I sat stunned. At least three lies resided in that sentence. African Americans never “took over”; all Southern states had white governors during Reconstruction, and all but one had white legislative majorities. The Reconstruction governments did not “screw up.” They adopted the best state constitutions most Southern states have ever had, started public schools for African Americans, and passed many other beneficial measures.

I visited nearby high schools and watched teachers presenting uncritically material on Reconstruction in textbooks written during the pre-Civil Rights era. Then I understood. My students had simply learned what they had been taught. This taught me that history had been deployed as a weapon against my students. To some extent it still is. Therefore teachers need to give students weapons to use in self-defense. Perhaps the best of these is historiography.

Put most simply, “historiography” means the study of history. When was this history written? Who wrote it? Who didn’t write it? Is it based on credible sources?

Reconstruction offers a fine way to introduce students to historiography. Teachers can visit used bookstores, which sell old textbooks for as little as 50¢. Many published before 1923 are also available on the web. Different editions of the same book offer a particularly effective demonstration of the importance of historiography. The 1966 edition of The American Pageant, for example, not yet influenced by the Civil Rights Movement, took largely negative views of blacks and of Reconstruction: “The ill-prepared colored voter, duped by Radicals, had allegedly done so poorly that the [white] South found further justification for denying him the ballot.”