Great post, Janet. I didn't realize this fight was going on in Texas social studies lessons. I agree with what you wrote:

"Including women and people of color in the text books aren't about excluding white men. It's about including the contributions of every sector of our society."

I think Barton and Marshall are just plain wrong. I'm a big fan of the Founding Fathers, but they would be the first to admit that they were not the demigods that conservatives seem to want to make of them. Joseph Ellis describe's John Adams' attitudes towards history in his book Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation:

"This insight was precocious, anticipating as it did the distinction between history as experienced and history as remembered, most famously depicted in Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace. (The core insight- that all seamless historical narratives are latter-day constructions- lies at the center of all postmodern critiques of traditional historical explanations.) Under Rush's prodding influence and in response to his dreamy inspirations, Adams realized that the act of transforming the American Revolution into history placed a premium on selecting events and heroes that fit neatly into a dramatic formula, thereby distorting the more tangled and incoherent experience that participants actually making history felt at the time... The real drama of the American Revolution, which was perfectly in accord with Adams' memory as well as with the turbulent conditions of his own soul, was its inherent messiness. This meant recovering the exciting but terrifying sense that all the majoy players had at the time- namely, that they were making it up as they went along, improvising on the edge of catastrophe."

In focusing only on the contributions of certain important leaders towards the idea of a republic, as Barton and Marshall want to do, is a rather constricting view that leaves out too much of what makes the United States what it is. In the article it is quoted:

"Barton, a former vice chairman of the Texas Republican Party, said that because the U.S. is a republic rather than a democracy, the proper adjective for identifying U.S. values and processes should be "republican" rather than "democratic." That means social studies books should discuss "republican" values in the U.S., his report said."

Such a view not only leaves out Chavez, Marshall and Hutchison, it also leaves out important white men like Thoreau, William Lloyd Garrison, William Jennings Bryan, Thomas Paine. It's not only women and minorities that Barton seems to want to exclude, but also leaders who were important in making our country more inclusive. I agree with what Howard Zinn wrote in the introduction of his People's History:

The treatment of heroes (Columbus) and their victims (the Arawaks)- the quiet acceptance of conquest and murder in the name of progress- is only one aspect of a certain approach to history, in which the past is told from the point of view of governments, conquerors, diplomats, leaders. It is as if they, like Columbus, deserve universal acceptance, as if they- the Founding Fathers, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Kennedy, the leading members of Congress, the famous Justices of the Supreme Court- represent the nation as a whole. The pretense is that there really is such a thing as "the United States," subject to occasional conflicts and quarrels, but fundamentally a community of people with common interests. It is as if there really is a 'national interest' represented in the Constitution, in territorial expansion, in the laws passed by Congress, the decisions of the courts, the development of capitalism, the culture of education and the mass media.

...My viewpoint, in telling the history of the United States, is different: that we must not accept the memory of states as our own. Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.

Thus, in that inevitable taking of sides which comes from selection and emphasis in history, I prefer to tell the story of the discovery of America from the viewpoint of the Arawaks, of the Constitution from the standpoint of the slaves, of Andrew Jackson as seen by the Cherokees, of the Civil War as seen by the New York Irish, of the Mexican war as seen by the deserting soldiers of Scott's army, of the rise of industrialism as seen by the young women in the Lowell textile mills, of the Spanish American was as seen by the Cubans, the conquest of the Philippines as seen by black soldiers on Luzon, the Gilded Age as seen by southern farmers, the First World War as seen by socialists, the Second World War as seen by pacifists, the New Deal as seen by blacks in Harlem, the postwar American empire as seen by peons in Latin America. And so on, to the limited extent that any one person, however he or she strains, can 'see' history from the standpoint of others.

My point is not to grieve for the victims and denounce the executioners. Those tears, that anger, cast into the past, deplete our moral energy for the present. and the lines are not always clear. In the long run, the oppressor is also a victim. In the short run (and so far, human history has consisted only of short runs), the victims, themselves desperate and tainted with the culture that oppresses them, run on other victims.

...I don't want to invent victories for people's movements. But to think that history-making must aim simply to recapitulate the failures that dominate the past is to make historians collaborators in an endless cycle of defeat. If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occassionally to win. I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past's fugitive moments of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare."