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Can you help me fact-check my history textbooks?

Asked by Mimishu1995 (23626points) March 24th, 2021

OK, so this is another Revolutionary War question. I hope you don’t get too tired of me for asking so much about that :(

I’m in the process of fact-checking what I used to learn at school. Recently, I looked back at my history textbooks which are still being used to teach kids today, because I wanted to confirm that my misconception about the Revolutionary War wasn’t because I slept in class. And I came across some… really interesting things in the textbooks. They looked so suspicious that I needed some help to verify if they are accurate.

The Revolutionary War is taught by three textbooks throughout my school day. I’m going to sum up what each of them says.

- 8th grade history textbook: the Revolutionary War is only a small section in a larger chapter about wars during the 17th century – 19th century. The war broke out because the British tried to prevent America from getting too economically developed for reasons never explained, and they did that by enforcing taxes, stealing lands and banning America from trading with other countries. As a side note, the 13 colonies were also adopting capitalism at this time.
– 10th grade history textbook: there is now a chapter for the war. It basically repeats the same thing about the British’s ruling over America and the capitalism thing, except that they now explain that the reason why the British tried to oppress America was because America was becoming such a big economic center that they were competing against Britain, which didn’t please the British very much. Also one of the reasons why the Americans were so angry was because they couldn’t explore the land to the West.
– 11th grade advanced history textbook: this one is pretty… disjointed, which facts scattering around and very little to connect the ideas. This book is more focused on presenting facts than the other two. Basically it says that although the America was ruled over by the British, the 13 colonies had developed their own government. The 13 colonies were an important trading market of the British. The British enforced harsh laws onto the colonies for reasons not explained either. Sandwiched among these are the same things about capitalism and the American economy growing big. The book then concludes that the Americans got angry because of the strict laws and because they had developed their own identity as a separate country and they wanted to be free of the British’s oppression.

What do you think about these three books? Does what they say have any truth to it, or is it just blatant misinformation?

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