Silence in America Textbooks

Abstract

[Excerpt] Although more than two decades separate us from the time when the Allied forces revealed the depth and dimensions of the Nazi horror, America’s textbook-writing historians still do not understand the demands the death camps place on each of them as scholar and as educator of the young in our public schools and universities. They continue to write in the tradition that prepared no one for the catastrophe, a tradition that still prevents us from attempting to assess and understand what happened; for with precious few exceptions they write of the years before 1945 as if the 1930’s and 1940’s did not require a re-examination of European history during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.