Teaching 'history' in schools - how do we approach ' national legends'?

[mintogrubb.livejournal.com]

Well, actually, it was the Deep South, but the action took us to the northern States, too. It will also involve a quick visit to the Wild West and the town of Shinbone - so let's hit the trail...

I was googling for maps Underground Railway Maps, actually. Me, being a tube worker on the London Underground, I was gonna do a piece on the history of London for another publication - but I saw a map of America, criss crossed by lines. I didn't know they had a network that went from Mobile in Alabama right up to the Canadian border - running underground, all the way... but there was on this map!

Well, they don't. "The Underground Railroad" refers to a shadowy network of volunteers who helped runaway slaves escape to Canada in the days before the American Civil War. If a slave ran away, there was a network of sympathisers who would act as guides, offer safe houses, give them food and clothing and send them on to the next place they could seek assistance.

The Underground Railroad is steeped in History and in Legend, and I draw a sharp distinction here. For while people like Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass (with 2 s's) are well documented and historical characters, they were also shadowy individuals at work in it. Men like 'Peg Leg Joe', for instance. (Full details under cut, but shortened to save space)

Old 'Peg Leg', he was a white man, an itinerate carpenter who went down to the Plantations near Mobile every year. Doing odd jobs for the white folks on the plantations north of Mobile, Alabama. By day he worked for the plantation owners. By night he would gather with the black folk around the camp fires under the stars, and teach them all a song.

A song full of encoded instructions. He taught them the meanings of the coded words, and it told anyone who could read the code when the best time to set off, what route to follow, how to get to safety.

The white owners would not let their slaves read. Knowledge was power, so the black folk were kept ignorant. But even if a slave could not read, s/he could still learn the words of a song, and teach it to others, together with it's secret meanings. And in due time, many took the road to freedom, helped by the song the old man taught them.

Well, that is the legend. NASA ran with it, for the story tells how the runaway slaves could look up, find and follow the North Star. Children's authors wrote books for kids about how whole families - daddy, mom, and the kids - took to the road and made a break for freedom.

"Follow the drinking gourd" the song said - a coded referece to the Big Dipper. That pointed the way north. The way to Canada, and freedom.

Even black history sites took it up. This celebrated black resistance to slavery, the courage of those who left the relative safety of the plantaion for the danger of the open road. It also mentioned the white abolitionists who went south to help the oppressed. The Legend had something for everyone- except the slave owners!

It taught black kids especially about their own people's past, and presented people like Harriet tubman in a positive and heroic way. And it showed that not all the white people were mean and horrid slave owners. I mean, what is not to like?

Especially when it points out that many people who were involved in "The Underground Railroad2 were non conformist Christians - Presbyterians, Quakers and so forth. People that even a limey like me would be proud to call 'one of our own' in some sense.

And yet, when researchers looked into the history of this song and how it came about, there were some details that seemed strange. the song , when it was first mentioned in writing, was not recorded before or after the Civil War - but in the 20th century, by a white guy who was into folk music.

And yet, up north, where the old sailor man 'Peg Leg Joe' supposedly hailed from, nobody knew of, or mentioned him. No plantation in the south holds any record or memory if this man either.

And all the available evidence seems to say that the song was merely a 'manufactured' legend. Anyone who has ever tossed a stone into a pond will tell you - "the bigger the stone, the bigger the splash".

So, looking at the records, if there really was a secret route to the North, being used by runaaway slaves, you would see some evidence in the records of the day.
the records actually show that most runaways who made it to freedom were from border staes, and not the Deep South.
That the Underground Railway was a cellular organisation , where everyone knew the next links in the chain , but nobody knew much else. That way, if anyone got arrested, there was no way they could compromise the whole network under interrogation.

as investigations proceeded, it began to look like the legend lives on, not for what it shows us, or what it can prove - but rather for what it tells us, for what it says us. It lives on for what it says about courage and fortitude, for what it says about the poor and powerless resisting and outwitting their powerful oppressors.

Children will like it, and learn something we hoppe, from the tale of two kids ( one boy and one girl) who run off with momma to leave the plantations and go to a better life. So we tell it to them. this song , and the legend beind it, say more about the thinking of people who lived in the 20th century like me, than it does about the railroad and it's organisers.

But, as the newspaper editor says near the end of the film "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" - "When the Legend becomes a fact, print the legend".

Americans are not that different from anyone else in some ways. Brits who can remember them still invoke the memories of the Blitz, or Dunkirk - moments of almost sacred significance in the history of our nation. American films will have you believe that American troops fought the Japanese in Burma, or that Americans captured the Enigma codebreaking machine from the Nazis. And a lot of these stories (British and American versions of events) are often very wrong on the details.

As a British, Non-conformist left winger, I have read an awful lot of 'heroic tales' about 'our' past. And I am getting to be a bit ambivalent about the recieved versions of events sometimes. I wish those on the left, the 'alternative history' advocates could come up with something a bit more convincing - something that really *did* show that the bad guys got outwitted. Someone as real as Joan of Arc or Harriet Tubman did appear sometimes, and we ought focus on these, and be be critical before we go giving anyone else like 'Peg Leg Joe' the thumbs up, I reckon.

This site tells the full story with all the details, if anyone is interested.

http://www.followthedrinkinggourd.org/

But what is your take - how should we present ' inspirational stories ' to kids in schools, if we do it at all? How about the tales of Moses, or Jesus of Nazereth?

As a Christian who has studied the Bible for myself, I have to question some of the interpretations of 'Received Wisdom' on the subject, sometimes. Maybe we should point out to schoolkids that what they read in books is only there for them to check, not to be swallowed whole and uncritically. Over to you....

Comments

[anadinboy.livejournal.com]

i dunno mint, when were you last at school? for years now teachers have been bragging about how they have moved away from 'great man' theory and onto teaching the kids more critical thinking, though having said that my neices seem to be sudying the same things i did, they start them off with jesus and david and goliath (we dont have the same level of seperation of church and state as americans)when they are young, then onto Tudors and Stuarts, and now for older kids its all anne frank and holocaust.
one interesting thing missing from my neices knowlege is the arabian nights tales, as in my day it was unheard of to find a kid who didnt know ali baba etc. Maybe thats considered a touchy subject these days?

[ninboydean.livejournal.com]

I learned absolutely nothing about Arabian Nights in history class. graduated '04 in VA

[mintogrubb.livejournal.com]

hate to tell you, buddy, but 'Arabian Nights' does not come under History - you shoulda stayed away when they did Literature :)

[mintogrubb.livejournal.com]

Actually, I was *at* school in 1973, and that was in Great Gritain.

And yet for all the teachers braggin' about how we teeach kids to be 'critical thinkers' an' all that, i come across a story on the inerwebs here and what do i find/

A NASA website, as used by teachers, is telling American children about something and not even getting the details right.

i mean , according to the NASA site, cited in the link, the NASA boys are saying that the song told the slaves to leave in winter when the Quali migrate and follow the Drinking Gourd, as the slaves knew the Great Bear or Big Dipper, to canada in the north.

Well, as the website explains, American Quail are non migratory - the song hints that when the quails mating call sounds 9 in springtime. Dagnabbit, if you don't know your own wildlife, you should not be posting websites aimed at providing info for teachers to pass onto yr own kids.

Anyway, having told the slaves to leaveat the right time, the song goes on to teach them a bit of geography - all well and good.

But is this history , or simply folklore?
Well, it turns out to be folklore fressed up as history.
maybe teachers should just point kids to the 'drinking gourd' website where they can learn how dumb government departments really are.

The sad fact is that Feminists with PhDs behind them are also peddling dubious ' facts' about quilts and their role in the Underground railroad, and getting lots of money for doing so.

Personally, i would have more respect for Female Feminists with PhDs if they were to focus on real, factual history like Harriet Tubman than lead us to believe that quilts were a kind of secret signalling system , when there isn't any real evidence for this, and a lot of expert testimony argues against it.

My real point is that legends should be taught as 'legends' to younger kids, but kids old enough to use reason and analysis should be shown how to do proper research and evaluate the evidence.

those on the NASA website obviously know about the controversy surrounding the song , but do not update their own errors, even when the errors have been exposed as such.

And this does not bode good for the American education system.
Mind you, I bet I could find a good deal of errors in contemporary British primary text books if I looked.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

The problem with women's history is that history in the event was written by rich older men in all cultures and while women have played larger roles even in this context than people appreciate, the role women played even if not at all different from what men did served only that women would get soundly lambasted for it.

What is perhaps the most clear-cut version of this is the Chinese Huangdi Wu Zhao who if a man would have been seen as one of the great Chinese Emperors. Zhao was a woman and so got criticism from the Confucian literati for what was the ordinary state of affairs at the time. People also tend to overlook that life was more equitably distributed insofar as the harsh and brutal and short bit was concerned for both genders prior to the 19th Century and it was only in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution that the ideal of separate spheres came into its own.

It most assuredly existed before in some contexts, like Hellenistic and Jewish cultures of the Ancient Mediterranean world but for 1,000 years afterward it proved impossible to make work. The emergence of separate spheres is a great example of how technological progress does not lead to what we would consider the "natural" social progress along with it.

[mintogrubb.livejournal.com]

The problem with women's history is that history in the event was written by rich older men

Granted, there ought to be more focus on the roles of ppl like Florence Nightingale, Susan B. Anthony and Harriet Tubman. However, to insist that women on plantations were using patterns that did not exist till dacades after is not giving us any version based on facts.

Harriet's Tubman's use of 'wade in the water' and other negro spirituals is well attested to. The making of quilts as a secret signalling device is not.

Do we go with the idea that we can control the past and manufacture evidence where none exists, or should we simply use what is actually there?

me, i would love it if it could be shown that these patterns were in use in the right period, and that a man like peg Leg Joe would actually turn up on file somewhere - but these things do not happen.

instead, we get the figures showing us that most slaves - less than 5% - came to freedom in the north from the Deep South. the border states were more successful. comparatively few escaped in total, but it was enough to worry the white slave owners.
And most posters we have show that the runaways were young males in their 20s - men who could move fast and travel far. There were few who ran off as mother and children or family units.

And at some point we have to look at the realities that underlie these stories. maybe if feminists can show some form of resistance existed that really can be authenticated, then it would be an achievement. but this is merely ' lets pretend' and backfires when the academics tear it to shreds.
"Hidden in Plain Sight", as a book, does no one credit. Why not investigate the true stories of the Underground Railroad?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

See the problem is that the Underground Railroad is shrouded in myth in no small part because only a tiny portion of the US population was willing to entertain racial equality, and most of those were black leaders who advocated a view like that of MLK: economic justice for all and social integration for blacks.

One thing that was very common in the 19th Century was the Boston Marriage, which some people see as a then-socially acceptable version of lesbianism (which very much both simultaneously underrates and overrates how homophobia worked in pre-modern societies).

What you say is true but you're ignoring certain things here. The Deep South states were surrounded by other slave states, where the border states were right on the Mason-Dixon line. One of those is much easier to escape from than the other. This also ignores that slaves very much did resist slavery by means that whites often attributed to racial inferiority instead of recognizing it for what it was. And of course Nat Turner stands as the leader of the largest slave revolt before the US Civil War but he was never the only one.

Blaming feminists for the legends that surround the Underground Railroad is IMHO a fine example of privilege-fail. Feminists did not create the myths. The Underground Railroad, as an example of bi-racial resistance to a racial injustice in the context of US history where the Lost Cause still predominates in views of both slavery and the Confederacy, has attracted myths more due to white male conservatives than to feminists.

[mintogrubb.livejournal.com]

What you say is true but you're ignoring certain things here.
The Deep South states were surrounded by other slave states, where the border states were right on the Mason-Dixon line. One of those is much easier to escape from than the other.
I can understand how the Border States would be easier to escape from - but the whole point of the 'peg leg Joe' legend was that he helped people escape from the deepest part of the Deep South.

In actual fact, we don't find him like we find Tubamn in history.
It would be a remarkable aceivement if he had got a route going from near the coast of Alabama right the way through to Ohio - but where are the people who took it? What about the cellular structure? where were the safe houses en route that the slaves would have needed? It is even contested that the route given was not the safest or best - were the river banks that easy to traverse?

Yes, I would like to see this as valid history- but the more I look at it, the more it seems like middle class white myth. I want to hear more about what really did happen, rather than a white tainted legend, spun by white men themselves who made themselves look good in the process of making the story...

Feminists did not create the myths.
It's a feminist author who penned the book on quilts.
Again , I would dearly love to hear how the black people outsmarted their white overlords - any means that success was achieved is something we can learn from, and use ourselves in the anti racist struggle in the UK and elsewhere.

However, as I continue to say, black history is better than black mythology and folklore when confronting skeptics.

http://www.ugrrquilt.hartcottagequilts.com/

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

See the problem is that slavery itself has attracted a great deal of mythology surrounding it as opposed to the institution that actually existed. People do not tend to realize that in Jefferson's day the institution actually was dissolving. Then cotton gins made cotton farming possible on the Atlantic coast and the immense profits led to a much more deeply embedded and sinister version of slavery than its predecessor.

People also like to ignore that a full 1/4 of the North's manpower in the US Civil War was white and black Southerners and of course that Fort Pillow was a twofer for Confederates to massacre with white Unionists (see: Nueces Massacre, Kingston Hangings) and black Southerners (see: Jefferson Davis's speech on Christmas Eve specifying the execution of black troops if they should be captured on the battlefield). They also like to ignore that realistically speaking it took both Yankees and anti-Confederate southerners to defeat the Confederacy, Yankees on their own could not have done it.

[mintogrubb.livejournal.com]

I was rather welcoming you coming in on this - it is, after all, 'on your turf' so to speak - you live there, geographically, and the knowledge of the era you displayed before I posted was quite remarkable.

however, sometimes , you lose me.
Sorry, i'm a Brit, and I don't really get what a ' twofer' is - my Americanses is not that fluent!

But , can i post a link or two about the quilt making business/ maybe there is room for an OP here.

Ok, Let me return to the point you make about cotton Gins.
As i recall, the cotton gin allowed cotton seed to be extracted from the cotton faster than by hand - so mechanised processing took over from manual labour, weakening the need for slaves to toil.
but , slaves were still needed to plant and harvest, were they not?

Ok, I take the point that christians made a moral argument against the slve trade, but it was only when it became uneconomic that britain abandoned it, and , as i understand it - the British Empire excluded anti slavery legislation from taking effect in India , where slavery still had its uses.

If you can elaborate further, II would appreciate the info.

I am also indebted to you for your info on the numbers involved in the ACW - I never forgot , I was completely unaware to begin with that 25% of the Northern manpower was white and black southerners who fought for the Union cause.

Yet, the bone of my contention is not so much the war itself as the impact and the methods of the Underground Railroad.

The picture presented by some sites is that a single white person went to plantations near Mobile and gave the slaves there a message encoded in song, and this led significant nnumbers of black slaves to find their way to freedom.

Facts of history though , argue that
-less than 2% of escapeees headed north- most people escaping from the deep south went to Florida , Mexico or big towns like New Orleans and blended in with free blacks there.
-the Underground railroad documents Tubman more than Peg Leg Joe, and that there is no other 'map song' known to exist.
-it's cellular structure and it's leadership make it unlikely that they would be telling slaves the entire route in one hit, or advising them to leave in winter. Most escapes were not clustered in spring , but went ahead any time of year, instead of being 'calender driven'.

on the basis of this, it seems that peg leg Joe is just a legend-
but we still have this song, displaying a very accurate description of the terrain of the deep South- knowledge so detailed that many northern townies just don't get it.

Only a real outdoorsman could have written this song, knowing when quail actuallycall, and the geography of the rivers. I still cannot work ou how the song came into being - unless Parks, acting much out of character, wrote it himself.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Twofer is a colloquialism that means that while a fort manned purely by white Southern loyalists or USCT would have angered the Confederate troops, the Confederates would have been far more angeredto have bothtogether.

Yes. The Cotton gin made large-scale cotton plantations viable, without it cotton farming would have been limited to the Sea Islands off the Georgia coast. Sometimes technological progress does not lead to the kind of social-cultural progress people expect.

There was also that British and Northern industrialism in the first textile phase very much did depend on the cotton grown on the plantations. It was one reason that like in 1914 the industrialists were among those with the most to lose in the even of a large-scale war.

The other emancipation few mention is that in 1860 the Tsar of Russia, Alexander II decreed no more serfs and there were in fact no more serfs and Russia became entirely a free society. Albeit it's seldom when this discussion comes up in why the US Civil War happened that people realize the Russian Tsars learned very well from their defeat in the Crimean War, hence why they did so much better in the war of 1877 twenty years later.

One thing that you're overlooking here is that the age of the Underground Railroad was also the heyday of the Second Middle Passage, when blacks were moved around without regard to their families or any sense of human compassion or decency. A lot of the more horrible sides of slavery became transparent and were done on the large scale in this era. There's a reason that the slaves had songs about being sold "way down south to Georgia" because in fact that was an ongoing facet of society at the time.

The Underground Railroad was an attempt to free more slaves but that really didn't undermine slavery to any extent until the start of the US Civil War when slaves did far more to free themselves than white men did.

[mintogrubb.livejournal.com]

One thing that you're overlooking here is that the age of the Underground Railroad was also the heyday of the Second Middle Passage

there is a lot of things coming out here that I am completely unaware of.

At school , I learned hat there was a 'triangle of trade' - the ships left England carrying bolts of cloth and trinkets - cheap but gaudy goods to trade on the African coast for slaves. they then took the slaves to America ( the Middle passage) , before making their way back to england, loaded with sugar, cotton , and all the goods that the colonies and the Carribean plantations could provide.

But the Second Middle Passage was something else I was completely unaware of. As I understood it, black people arriving in the colonies were split up, sold off seperately from parents, children and spouses right from day 1. i guess that had a family grown up on a plantation , this was yet another indignity they had to face.

Going back to this song , though- the argument is raised that by feminist writings like 'Hidden in Plain View' presenting a false ye romantic picture of what was really going on , we do not get anything of value from it.

On the other hand, there are those who argue that it is a sort of faith, a bit like Christianity or Judaism - who cares if it is historically true that black women used quilts to send messages to each other or to white sympathisers, the belief that they could have and did is what susteins many in the fight against real oppression. If we cannot have a true history, we will invent one.

er, not to take sides with the oppressors here, but as a member of a bona fide Christian Church, I think it safe to say that it is widely acceted by most of my denomination that Adam and Eve are regarded as allegorical- the focus of the Church is centred on practical teachings like the Good Samaritan.

This may not be the way that fundamentals would have us go, but there it is. Is there any logical argument for saying that we ought to 'pretend' that things were otherwise than they were in the antebellum South?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Yes, this was part of the Atlantic world and it's also perhaps one of the most brutal products of the modern world, on par with the Belgian Congo for sheer devastation brought in pursuit of what was then perfectly modern.

This was in the USA, post the USA's abolition of the slave trade. As slavery became less important in the upper South, the slaves were increasingly sold to the Deep South and if families were broken up so be it.

Nobody's saying that this should be pretended for one thing. For another there were very many Christians at the time who felt that the Bible very much did condone slavery, and probably had a more clearcut case than its opponents did. That they did this to justify a brutal and inhuman institution is also true. The belief God sanctioned some to be masters and some to be slaves was responsible in all truth for the origin of at least one denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention.

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

But is this history , or simply folklore?

And this is the rub. As underlankers has been saying, women were actively ignored by history (as were lower classes, POC etc.). This means that we have to change how we view our source material. There's been a big debate in Australia over the Stolen Generation and the Indigenous genocide, because many people believe you can't use personal stories from 40 years ago, or the stories handed down from grandparents as source material.

However, I ask you this; in 100 years time, would you invalidate the collected folk lore of an entire race or subgroup about this day and age, whilst taking everything from a Murdoch paper as fact? Yes, human memory is fallible, but journalists and government documents are horrendously biased. This is the point behind the History wars; what can we use as source material? Revisionists prefer to be able to use as much as possible and evaluate the use of each piece on its own merits, rather than wholesale excluding one form and giving another primacy.

Back to the point, the reason why "feminists with PhDs" are getting grants is because they're studying something that hasn't been studied a lot in the past. Do we really need another book about Lincoln or Churchill? To deny what these people are doing as valid History is to say that you are unimportant and that you should submit all of your will to your political masters. Either the non-elite of the past matter, or we don't.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Not to mention that the Disney movie versions may overshadow the rather more crapsack world original tales when *all* the Djnun were Jackass Genies and the setting is set in the reign of Caliph Harun Al-Rashid. OTOH one can also say this about say, Superman who went from pseudo-anarchist to defender of the Establishment....sellout.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Like the original view of Wonder Woman Superman's the kind of character it takes certain skilled writers to do properly. Most of today's comic book editors do not tend to like such writers as today's comic book editors are essentially the worst type of ascended fanboy imaginable.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

The thing is that the Underground Railroad is the kind of thing myths *do* cluster around. One thing nobody ever brings up about *why* so many fugitive slaves fled to England was that the States' Rights crowd used the Fugitive Slave Law to disregard the states' rights of free state with impunity. No part of the continental United States was therefore safe and it was a relatively common practice to take Northern free blacks into slavery to collect the bounties people gae for such things.

The bigger problem is that while the Union indisputably won the war of armies, the Confederates won the aftermath and set up the Jim Crow regimes founded by ex-Confederates and maintaining a racist one-party terror regime into the 20th Century. The bad guys did not lose, they actually won. And the good guys, aside from some of the black leaders of the Civil War were, not in the least interested in racial equality. Abolition of slavery was to prevent competition with free labor capitalism, and white abolitionists, most of them, wanted blacks to "colonize" Africa.

The only people advocating present-day racial egalitarianism were men like Frederick Douglass and the odd white man like John Brown or William Lloyd Garrison. I have my doubts that the Carrie Nation temperance feminists actually bothered with the idea of equal rights at all.

[mintogrubb.livejournal.com]

I think I better go google Carrie Nation.

This reminds me...

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

Not too long ago, I ran into the "Brownsville Affair" as a remarkable case of fudged history. It wasn't until the 1970s that the incident was investigated thoroughly. Even African Americans fell for the false report of black soldiers running riot in the streets of Brownsville, Texas. The incident led to a major rift between W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington.

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

You seem to be missing the point of revisionist history (and I mean revisionist in the academic sense of the word, not the pejorative it gets bandied about as). Liberal Historians (those in the great person/grand narrative mold) are the ones who tell stories about heroes, the facts be damned. This is why revisionists have come out in the last 20 years; there's been a desire to reevaluate the evidence and discover what happened, not perpetuate the nation building myths that sufficed as "history" in the past.

The problem with this is two fold: 1) by destroying the grand narrative, a lot of people have gotten pissed off. People don't like being told their heroes were actually bastards most of the time. 2) it's caused History to become ever more navel gazing; a lot of it has become an academic wank about what is and is not valid evidence. Most people don't give a shit about this, they just want a good story. I'm not saying revisionists can't give a good critical analysis, whilst telling a good story; I think I do a great job of making the contested nature of history the narrative - but I'm a natural story teller, most Historians aren't.

There's a certain amount of hand wringing going on in the academic Historian community about how it's non-Historians who are selling History books these days. It's mostly journalists, which is interesting in itself that journalism is attracting the good story tellers, rather than those who have good critical reasoning. However, that's because the stuff most Historians write is as boring as hell. I went through one of the worlds most pre-eminent revisionist History faculties, and writing in an enjoyable and engaging way was actively discouraged. It was "unprofessional" to tell a good yarn. In the end it's what made me get out of there. I got into History because it was fun, and I wanted to keep it that way. Teaching teenagers how to do revisionist History whilst still telling a good story is immensely more satisfying.

[green-man-2010.livejournal.com]

It is interesting that you are a historian yourself.
from my POV, I think that there is a difference between History and 'Journalism' - in the sense that a journalist is someone ususally writing with an ' angle'

famous example of it is the New York Times headline " World Ends Tommorrow - Women and Blacks Affected Most".

Ok, that was apocryphal, but the point iis that I notice that in the UK at least, Newspapers stories appear spun towards their readership. the Sun will go on about how the budget will affect a working class family - cost of food and drinks ; the Mail will focus on the Middle classes and the price of houses and sending your kids to university.

And when it comes to the War of Independence or the Slave Trade - well I think that personal Points of View should give way to ob jective analysis.

For me, it was fun to tease apart the story behind the legend, and I think that narration needs to turn to another tack - "this is how different parties see things and this is how legends get formed , kids".

Robin Hood was not a noble Norman knight who got disspossessed by King John - that was the upper classes trying to appropriate him for themselves, and imply that the Saxons were incapable of self leadership and thereby self government. Nor was he a Saxon peasant who rodbbed from the rich and gave to the poor. his earliest stories focus on the fact that he robbed rich guys and kept the loot. he never robbed saxon peasants who had nothing to steal - but good luck to him on taking down those overlords of ours a peg or two.

Teaching kids to interpret and investigate history is important , as it also teaches them to interpret the news, and be skeptical of the pundits.