Frances Fitzgerald's Rewriting American History

What do most people remember about their American history classes from high school? They may remember that they learned Columbus and his ‘discovery’ of the new land or that Lincoln fought to end all slavery, but in reality students do not remember much. This is also jaded by the fact that most of what we do remember, turns out to have a slight hint of falsehood. Frances FitzGerald, author of Rewriting American History, uses his essay to analyze what a person learns in their history classes, and has found that what people have learned in their history classes may depend on how long ago they were taught the subject. The main point of his essay was to show the fact that because history books are updated so frequently, most students are only going to read from one version of history. FitzGerald expressed his concern for
In today’s society, it only takes a few seconds to ‘google’ what is going on in the world. If something major happens across the lake, then millions of people are alerted to it through a ‘Twitter trend.’ My point is that the world has evolved rapidly since 1979 and as such so has education. FitzGerald looks at the type of questions that new history textbooks ask of students, and notices that they are a lot more intuitive. “. . .[the questions] force the student to think much as historians think: to define the point of view of the speaker, analyze the ideas presented, question the relationship between events, and so on,” (780). Although FitzGerald offers this example in order to compare the learning process to processes used in older textbooks, this example can also be used to support the fact that textbooks are adapting to help kids adapt to the quickly changing world. The question of the matter is whether the process of history education should change any further to better fit in with this new, more connected