From the North and South’s view of the Civil War to those of China versus Japan of WWII, interpretations of history differ wildly across the world.
When you enter your host country, knowing their historical perspective can help you better understand myriad aspects of their culture.
It can also help you avoid stepping on any landmines that might lead to a Monkey Moment.
History is in the eye of the beholder, and everyone wants to be the hero of their own story.
So, what “truth” do we choose to believe?
And what does it say about us?
Recent History in Textbooks
While distant history can still smart a bit, recent history often stings more.
9/11 is but one of those events.
The case of how 9/11 is presented in various textbooks across the globe shows how history isn’t necessarily skewed with time; it’s biased even in the moment, as originally reported by historical textbooks.
Graduate student, Elizabeth Herman, returned to her old high school about a decade after the tragic event had unfolded and discovered the school’s new history textbooks already detailed 9/11 and its aftermath.
She was curious how these events appeared in other school history textbooks around the world.
Interpreting 9/11
For her university thesis project, and later for research under a Fulbright scholarship, Herman analyzed textbooks from thirteen different countries to examine the differences in how this attack was being taught.
What she found:
- American textbooks highlight the tragedy using volatile language and emphasize how the country came together after the attack
- Pakistani textbooks call the assailants “unidentified terrorists,” omitting their identity
- Turkish textbooks omit their extremist Islamic faith
- Chinese, Brazilian, and Indian textbooks emphasize the “reckless” actions taken by the U.S. post-9/11 in their illegal war in Iraq
- Chinese textbooks also interpret 9/11 as a sign of the decline of American authority on the world stage
So, considering all these selective details and interpretations of history, what exactly is “the truth”?
The Truth
As we’ve previously discussed, from a cultural context, there is no One Truth – at least none that we’ll ever know, as bias will always exist, in the writing of history and in the reading of it.
But what these interpretations can teach us is how different cultures view the world, how they view themselves, and how they hope to shape future readers’ perceptions of it all.
You might say, “If no one’s telling The Truth, then history is useless.”
But that’s not the case. A country’s interpretation of history allows us to understand their rationale, to seek the “why,” and that’s the whole point when you’re trying to accept and adapt to a foreign culture.
As Herman said on the results of her thesis:
“If you hand a student thirteen different ways of looking at 9/11 from thirteen different countries and ask them, […] Why do you think it’s different? Why do you think that Pakistan tells this story one way and Brazil speaks about it a different way? I think that that’s the only way that we can actually reach a new understanding of this event.”
Success Across Cultures 