I have never read, nor will I ever write, an alternate history as creative and thoroughly wrought as the one I read in high school. Alternate history requires the author to change a few fundamental facts about the history of the world we live in. These alterations usually take the form of “what if the Confederacy won?” or “what if the Nazis won?” or “what if the Industrial Revolution relied on steam?” But the alternate history book I read in high school had a premise deeper than these ones—something slightly less reductive, more far-reaching. Something that didn’t boil history down to a single pivotal event, but that instead boiled it down to a feeling, to an idea.
I studied this particular book for a full year—in a display of singular dedication to an idea, the teacher designed her entire district-approved curriculum around it. The premise of this particular alternate history was “what if everything was fine?”
This supposition was carried through the text with a level of meticulous finesse that I’ve never seen anywhere else. It permeated every facet of the built world on which the book was focused. What if, the book supposed, America had been entirely undiscovered prior to 1492? What if the Pilgrims had been a peaceful, God-loving people? What if they had worked together with the Native population, rather than slaughtering them and stealing their land? What if voyages of exploration were driven by a pure, heartfelt desire to expand the map of the world, and nobody had ever been interested in gold or drugs or slaves?
What if everything was fine?
What if the country wasn’t built on the backs of enslaved peoples? What if slavery was rare, and when it happened, the slaves were usually treated quite well? What if the founding fathers who did own slaves were good guys who should be admired and celebrated? What if sexual assault didn’t exist? What if the Trail of Tears was a mutual endeavor? What if the Civil War was driven more by dry economic and political factors than by a desire to perpetuate the subjugation of slaves? What if America never participated in eugenics? What if America was always staunchly anti-fascist and anti-Nazi?
What if everything was fine?
What if the biggest problems we had during the industrial revolution were monopolies that needed busting? What if child labor was a thing of the past? What if women and free people of color and people who weren’t heterosexual were nonexistent until sometime in the late 1800s, or the 1920s, or the 1960s, depending on who you ask? What if the battle for equal rights was won in the 1960s? What if racism stopped being a problem back then? What if heterosexual able-bodied white men were the only people who drove history forward? What if capitalism and empire were systems that helped make everyone’s lives better? What if everyone had equal opportunities to succeed in a fair society?
What if everything was fine?
This was the alternate history my teacher built her curriculum around, and it consumed our education. We would ask questions that ignored the thorough worldbuilding of the text, and the teacher would patiently steer us back to the Text, always the Text, sola scriptura, Amen. One of my classmates might ask, “what about…?” The teacher would remind the class that no, in the world built by this text, that never happened. Or it did happen, but not like that. Don’t write that answer down on the test, because you’ll fail. Even if it’s your history in question. Even if your family has told you their stories, and the stories don’t match what’s in the book. Don’t keep asking that question, because you’ll fail. Learn the story. Trust the story.
This book and the story contained within it is the poisoned well from which many Western alternate history writers drink before we attempt to breathe life into a new world. Too often, we return to that story and say “what should we change?” We do this in place of returning to that story and saying “what has been changed?” or “what should we believe?” As a result, many of us write stories which are achingly similar to the one we learned by rote, the one we were tested on in school. We regurgitate stories in which wealthy, landed white men drive history forward; stories in which slavery is a necessary evil; stories in which there are no Native people, no nonwhite people, no disabled people, no homosexual or bisexual or transgender people. But there’s steam and clockwork, or there are dinosaurs, or there are roughly-sketched pan-Asian influences where there would otherwise have been Greek and Roman flourishes. Many of us return to the alternate history we’ve read, the one in which everything was fine. We scribble in the margins and turn the scribbles into stories, and our stories carry with them the shortcomings of the original.
But what if our stories could be something better than marginalia? What if we built our alternate histories based on the world we actually live in—a world in which white people perpetually profit from the blood of people we’ve kidnapped and exploited? What would our stories look like if our alternate histories didn’t start with the premise that everyone is white and everyone is thin and everyone is heterosexual and everything is fine? The most exciting worldbuilding I see in the genre of alternate history are stories that truly are, in fact, alternate histories, rather than fanfiction written about a story we were told when we were children. They’re the stories that are hailed as endeavors of creative genius, because they do the work of pushing away the alternate history that has already been written. And it’s hard work to do, peeling the scales from our eyes to write stories that aren’t the one we already know. It’s hard not to hear that voice that reminds us: if you memorize the story incorrectly, you will fail.
Because we have all read and heard the story my high school teacher based her curriculum on. We all know the story by heart. It’s a story about the Western world, and civilization, and America’s history. It’s a story that has formed the foundation of America’s understanding of her own identity.
It’s the story told in my American History textbook, and it’s one of the most comprehensive works of fiction I’ve ever read.
Hugo, Nebula, and Campbell award finalist Sarah Gailey is an internationally-published writer of fiction and nonfiction. Her work has recently appeared in Mashable, the Boston Globe, and Fireside Fiction. She is a regular contributor for Tor.com and Barnes & Noble. You can find links to her work here. She tweets @gaileyfrey. Her debut novella, River of Teeth, and its sequel Taste of Marrow, are available from Tor.com.
A promising essay!
Orson Scott Card did manage to show that our history was, emphatically, NOT fine – both in Pastwatch: the redemption of Christopher Columbus, and in the Tales of Alvin Maker. Some of his other stories do seem to be offering excuses for what would otherwise look like wickedness though!
In the guidelines laid out in our moderation policy, we ask that you keep your comments on the site civil and be respectful of others, even if you disagree with their opinions. Please be aware that comments that are rude, dismissive, insulting, or aggressive in tone do not fall within those guidelines–you can read the full policy here for further clarification.
If only I was smart enough back than to realize what untruths they had taught me in high school.
I believed every word from that text, never questioned it one time.
I understand why the fiction is taught in elementary school. We want to establish a base understanding of our history and culture. But I wish by the time students are in High School history, more of the complexities of history would be included. We really don’t need to go over the same fiction over and over again.
Even if history is just the “great people”, there are great people from all countries, backgrounds, and genders.
We celebrated the 100th anniversary of the 1889 Oklahoma Land Run in elementary school. We recreated it with all the kids forming families and wearing settler dress. I didn’t really comprehend the large number of broken promises that Land Run represented until I was older. It started pissing me off at American History.
To honor that day, I should have been wearing a few more beads and been shoved into a corner of the room while being told to be quite and not complain when my land was taken by the other kids. Because that is exactly what happened on that day to my ancestors. After already being forced to march the Trail of Tears.
Your alternative history textbook and teacher still seem better than mine, which tried to explain all of history throught the lenses of marxism. Trying to explain to 15 year olds what was dialectic materialism and how it could explain the march of history is though, and maybe not very productive on the long run. Most of the history teachers of my country still do that, as far as I know.
Look i’m medium old (born at the start the Apollo program), and my life hasn’t been all cookies and cream. I’ve seen the tar-paper shack in the Cimmaron bottom land my mom was born in and the mountain cabin that my father was. They were born in 32 and 1919 respectively. But they and my family arc represent a much better story than what is told above.There are problems with our current world but i bet my diagnosis would be the opposite of what yours is.
I live in OK in what is now called midtown but was the 1930 equivalent of an exurb in the waning days of streetcars. I can afford this lovely house, because i am childless and the School district i attended in lower class neighborhood a few miles away has gone so far downhill that my my nice neighborhood is now for the childless and those with newborns before they have to move out to the suburbs to get a education they trust, or sacrifice for parochial school like my neighbors. Meanwhile, the affordable neighborhood of fifties home i grew up in is overflowing with Rent subsidized and illegal alien children as my parents generation dies off and the houses move downmarket. My neighborhood is full of strollers but few bikes, because the parents who Care about the future don’t see it here.
This is a roundabout way of saying, via my detour into neighborhood sidewalk traffic, that there are Religious,Political, Social, Racial, and Technological reasons that things are not fine everywhere. but your essay assumes that the Racial and Political events act in a vacuum. My once Suburban house becomes inner city in one long life because vehicles are so much better, and schools that helped me score in the 99th percentile and get into college becomes the worst district in the metro in just 30 years because of social, demographic, and cultural change. People act in their own or their families’s best interests, and those can be guided by good laws, but that is only one of the many levers driving things, and narrative of american progress was a good one for assimilation, and societal happiness and the breakdown of it is just one of the levers tearing apart society E Pluribus Unum does mean something, but it requires a belief in the superiority of the one that your essay is against.
“what if the Industrial Revolution relied on steam?”
I was rather under the impression that it did.
I’m not sure when or where the author went to primary school, but I don’t recall this “everything is fine” education. I distinctly remember learning about Japanese interment camps during WWII, small-pox laden blankets, McCarthyism, wheelchair-bound Franklin D. Roosevelt, slavery, Jim Crow, lynching, and the continuing fight for civil rights. MY public education wasn’t afraid to discuss the many cases we got it wrong. To me, the fact that someone isn’t called out for their sex or sexual orientation is a positive. If someone invented the first combustion engine, I don’t need to know, nor do I care, if she or he was bisexual. If someone invented the integrated circuit, I don’t need to know, nor do I care, if she or he was black.
You might not need to know, but lots of people consider these classes of people subhuman. These are the people that need to know that Alan Turing was gay and persecuted for it despite his great accomplishments. They need to know that Benjamin Banneker, a black man, helped lay out our nation’s capital among other accomplishments.
Interesting. My GCSE history education in the UK, twenty years ago (ish) was less focused on “this happened, then this person became king, then this happened”, but much more on the differences between primary and secondary sources, and the relative benefits and drawbacks of each when studying history. To put these ideas into practice we studied the inter-war years and the League of Nations (basically the beta version of the UN)
I think the idea was more to train us to be historians, rather than to teach us the details of any particular bit of history.
Equally though we weren’t taught any history that might make us question that (for example), maybe the Empire wasn’t a fantastic thing for everyone.
@8 The first industrial revolution of the modern era was steam powered, but that occurred mostly in Europe and Britain. The second industrial revolution of the modern era, the one that started in America, was electricity and diesel powered.
I’m on the older scale of people here. And while elementary school history was rather mythic in tone, once I’d moved into middle school and high school we were taught that not that other versions of history were right and what we’d heard was wrong, but that all of written history is alternate history; and while there are some facts, interpretation of those facts are always left the the one writing the history. That was what teachers in my Midwestern city wanted to impress upon us, to be wary of anyone who thought there was only one correct way to see the past.
@9 & 10; Turing’s sexual orientation has nothing to do with his work but the grief he got for being gay is certainly important if you are digging intohis biography – which might not be totally appropriate in say a computer science class.
I agree with the author’s premise overall: whitewashing does occur in history lessons, especially on the HS level. But where I disagree with the author is that she provides so many specific instances in history, that I (and many others I’m sure) can go through the list and say, “That’s not true… I learned that in HS, I learned that in HS, I learned that in HS,” and thus, her premise gets diluted. For instance, in my tiny West Tennessee HS, I learned about the horrors of slavery, and I learned about the Trail of Tears, and my history teacher didn’t white wash either of those events. It is true that I didn’t understand how savage Columbus and other explorers were when they arrived in the New Word, so I agree with some of the specifics of the article, but alas not all. So, while the article is true in the general sense, it’s too easy to pick apart on specifics, and thus is diminished as a whole.
Every nation embellishes its own history to one degree or another, often moving to outright untruths. The US is not an exception but having studied American history I can assure you guys that you are not the worst offenders.
Great article. I’d like to give a shoutout to James Loewen’s book Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, which goes point-by-point through the most popular US history textbooks to identify all of the “alternate history” being peddled there.
Harry Turtledove is one of the great alternate history writers to read. “Guns of the South” is excellent to read about the South winning the civil war. His short story “Joe Steel” which is now a book {that I must read soon} is about Stalin beating out FDR in a presidential election. Harry’s other complete works has a lot of alternate history subjects that are stunning to read.
The CLASH OF EAGLES trilogy, by Alan Smale is another genius story of Rome discovering America. Amazing!
Napoleon in America by Shannon Selin a good old tale of Alternate History of Napoleon Bonaparte escaping his prison island and settling in America. It’s a stunning Novel.
Those are the few I can remember for now. I know there is some other authors and books that one day I’ll read because Alternate history is just fun and its good to know your history. As for this upcoming book River of Teeth by Sarah Gailey I might glance at it as I pass it on the bookshelf in the bookstore or library.
i taught US history at Towson in Baltimore for a term as part of an exchange.
My US students knew less about US history than their UK counterparts because of this. I was truly shocked at the “one text book” approach. We just don’t teach history this way in the UK. I was appalled when it became clear they expected quizzes. For history?
This isn’t just about bias: I studied many controversial things in history at school in England and the delivery was often biased but it wasn’t closed off. We didn’t rely on only one narrative.
If you want to understand why US history text books are so often of the Everything is Fine school,I recommend James Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me, Which is a study of US history textbooks and the textbook market.
@12
The US was running on steam well into the 20th century. The last vestiges of the steam era held on into the 1950’s.
The elementary textbooks I was taught from didn’t lie, they just left some things out. One of the most influential books I ever read was A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn. It is very biased, but so were the textbooks. You can never learn too much history.
@23 History books have to leave things out. Good history books try and make the lacunae clear.
Thanks for this essay, I’m glad to see someone else having the same reaction I once did. As a history student out of personal interest since childhood, and a non-American, at age 14 I spent a year in an American school and the history text presented to us rubbed me the wrong way. I couldn’t shake the feeling that it glossed over everything that had been dark and unfair about history, and I read history for the dark and unfair. We’re supposed to learn from our past so we don’t repeat it, which means the dark and distasteful and unfair is the most important part.
Is there only a single American identity? If identity is based on understanding of history, there would be many hundreds of thousands of identities, and all of them constantly in flux. But the point that many of the history texts available to high school teachers are works of alternate history is a good one. That’s one of the many reasons why I admire Mrs. McDonnell, my 11th grade history teacher, who had us roleplay the first Constitutional Convention, told us about her experiences during the Watts Riots in the ’60s, and played Tom Lehrer songs for us. She poked holes in the painted backdrop that was our previous education in history and let light shine through. She helped us learn that “revisionist history” is a feature, not a bug, and that what we know about history shouldn’t stand still.
Just as the saying “In regards to wars, the winners write the history” is a truism, it’s also true that a majority of American history was written by Old White Men.
The world is a partially broken place filled with partially broken people living in partially broken societies. It is unsurprising that when examined closely, there is a lot of evil. Every generation has produced its villains, whether murderous or manipulative. Every society contains features that are unjust, that marginalize, that systematically exclude. It’s clear that you, Sarah, are really aware of this evil. I’m glad you aren’t blind to it. On the other hand, every generation produces people of good will, and every society contains features which tend to community, solidarity and embrace. The problem you are describing arises when history is presented simplistically because it is, in fact, very complex. However, it is possible to react and present a different history which is, in the end, no less simplistic. How can we guard against this?
This reminds me of the time my boyfriend asked for alternate history for Christmas and got a copy of Howard Zinn’s People’s History of America. Excellent essay.
@19 wichael, Joe Steele the novel is even better than the short story imo. It may be written by Harry Turtledove, but it’s bloodcurdlingly terrifying enough to be written by Stephen King! Turtledove is just an awesome author.
When I was in primary school, we were taught about the “heroic” explorers(many of whom were idiots, who got lost and died because they ignored advice)and settlers(who were being heroic and murdering the indigenous people or using them for free labour when they weren’t destroying the local wildlife and plants and bringing in European animals which still plague us). We learned that Captain Cook discovered Australia. Hah! He wasn’t even the first European on these shores. Fortunately, that teaching doesn’t happen any more, but we did have a prime minister, John Howard, who sneered at the “black armband view of history” and attempted to bring back the good old days of history lessons.
LOL
This reminds me of “America: a Narrative History” a book that went from Civil War to Regan and had more pictures of horses than women. There was exactly one picture of more than one woman without a man in the picture – and that’s a Tupperware party.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1373311.America
@31 I was disappointed that Joe wasn’t from Georgia. Though I never read the novel since I’ve lost my taste for Turtledove’s style of alternate history.
@29 earlofwessex
We can only change our black and white view of history with great difficulty. There’s something in human nature that likes separating people into neat boxes, so that we can have simple heroes and villains. Changing that mindset is going to take a lot of work.
Sometimes it helps to go through and look at the great heroes of history and ask ourselves “What did they wrong?”. At other times, it helps to look at genuinely awful times and ask ourselves what the people who lived then got right. Early America was defined by ethnic cleansing and slavery, but also by extraordinary levels of political and religious freedom. Poor and persecuted immigrants flocked to America, but many of them celebrated their escape from tyranny by driving Native Americans off the land they wanted.
America- real America, not the magical story- was and is plagued by conflict between the ideals and the reality of our founding. We can emphasize the hypocrisy without denying the value of the ideals, and true history includes both the crimes and the slow, painful progress towards keeping some of our promises.
@36 – “extraordinary levels of political freedom” in early America? Where do you get that idea?
More than half the adult population was ineligible to vote. Huge chunks of the population were prohibited from owning property or entering contracts, serving on juries, etc. People could be bought and sold as slaves, kidnapped, tortured, raped and exploited, completely legally.
Political freedom was severely limited, not at “extraordinary levels.”
Unless, of course, you only care about political freedom for property owning white men.
@37 Ursula
Extraordinary levels of political freedom for white European men, as you say. But for white European men, the freedom and opportunities America offered were revolutionary. Compared to Ireland or Prussia or England, America was an extraordinary land of freedom and opportunity, where a man could own his own land and have a voice in his country’s government.
Early America was a place that offered extraordinary freedom for most white men, while maintaining the oppressive and exploitative status quo for women, murdering the native population and stealing their land, and enslaving an entire class based on skin color. It is vital to acknowledge both America’s exceptional breakthroughs in the area of freedom for white men, and the fact that the citizens of the new democracy promptly used their freedom to continue taking away the rights of anyone who wasn’t like them. So yes, the level of freedom in America was extraordinary by the standards of the day. What they did with freedom, on the other hand, was generally little different than the behavior of the tyrants and colonists of Europe.
Lot of strong views here….as long as the outcome is not to punish the peoples of today for things of the past they were not here for.
@23, 30: My high school history class also read Howard Zinn’s book.
@38 – There were plenty of places where your odds of having freedom were far better than in the early US.
To start with, any place without slavery.
I can’t think of any freedom for white men that would be great enough to call US freedom “extraordinary” when people could be bought and sold and tortured and raped and had their children kidnapped from them. The extraordinary oppression rather ruins the average, no matter how nice it might have been if you were white and male.
People who wanted freedom fled from the US, which should be proof enough that the US was far from extraordinary in it’s level of freedom, and in fact was deficient compared to the places people chose to flee too.
You can’t just pick and choose whose freedom you value, when judging whether a society is free. Every society treats its elite class reasonably well. It’s how society values the least powerful, the weakest, that tells you how free it is, how just it is.
@38 – Another problem is that you are comparing apples to oranges. You’re comparing the ruling class of one culture (white men, particularly those who own property, in the early US) to the non-ruling classes of other cultures.
Of course things will look great in the early US, if you compare the privileged class here with the underprivileged classes elsewhere! Compare the life of a slave in the US to an aristocrat in England, and you’ll see opposite disparity. And in either place, whether you are in the powerful class or the powerless class is simply a matter of an accident of birth, not justice or merit. Each culture gave power to a particular minority population, for no good reason.
Look at the bottom of the social scale, not the top, to know if a society is just or free.
@38, 41 Ursula
I’m not going to defend America’s innumerable crimes against native peoples or slaves. When I said that pre-Civil War America offered an “extraordinary” degree of freedom to white residents, that statement didn’t deny the fact that America didn’t offer those freedoms to women, and didn’t offer any freedom at all to slaves.
What “extraordinary” did mean is that America’s freedoms of religion, speech, and political activity were not ordinary by the standards of most European nations at that time. You said that “More than half the adult population was ineligible to vote.” The number of white men permitted to vote in America was extraordinarily high by the standards of Great Britain or Holland, much less the European nations (Prussia, Russia) where voting didn’t even exist. The mere thought of having “universal rights”, even when those rights were restricted to the members of an approved ethnic group, was revolutionary.
America was a slaveowning nation that ethnically cleansed native peoples and didn’t treat women as citizens or people. It was also a nation that offered political and religious freedoms to its entire white male population. European nations, who generally shared America’s willingness to enslave or ethnically cleanse people they considered subhuman, did not provide the same political and religious freedoms to all members of the ruling ethnic group. They rightly considered Americans “extraordinary” for their ideas about universal rights regardless of class, even though most white American men weren’t interested in extending those rights to women or races they considered inferior.
People who wanted freedom did flee from the US. We need to remember that if we want to understand our history. Other people who wanted freedom fled to the US. We don’t need to forget that, either.