What do you do when the facts of history conflicts with beliefs about history? How do you reset understanding to reflect what actually happened?

Sometimes what we believe happened takes a spot in our heart – it could be a warm spot or a spot of anger – and you become fixed on that understanding. I know someone, for example, who remembers that her parents announced their divorce on her birthday, and holds onto a strong feeling of resentment as a result. None of the rest of the family remember it that way. But, by the time she finally revealed her deep-seated anger at this memory, decades had passed, the memory had become fixed in her mind, and no amount of reality-checking could shift her belief.

We see a lot of this in society today – and not always in ways that receive attention in the news. When I was in elementary school, they were still teaching that Columbus discovered America because everyone else was afraid they’d sail off the edge of the earth. Fact check: America had been “discovered” for over 10,000 years by then; at the time that Columbus sailed, it was generally accepted that the earth was round; the reason that “everyone else” didn’t voyage across the Atlantic was because they could tell that the far east – the destination Columbus was sailing for – was as far away as it actually turned out to be, which was much further away than Columbus thought it was.

This is a big example but there are little examples all over the place. Little examples that have become enshrined in our hearts and that we don’t want to give up.

Horwitz has a lot of fun in this book, revisiting the period in history when Europeans were first exploring North America and encountering the people and civilizations who had made America their home. He starts with the Vikings and continues to Columbus and his descendants, the French, the Spanish, the English. He goes back to primary sources to recreate their paths, sometimes coming into conflict with local beliefs which are enshrined in memorials and roadsigns.

I also enjoy some of the descriptions, by European explorers, of the natural ecology that they find: the Spanish conquistadors navigating through prairie grasses taller than they were and so resilient that, once a man passed through, the grass sprang back, causing untold numbers of men to get lost – and never found – in the prairies.

This is a fun book to read and I think it should be required reading for high school students, or at least college students, to help them see history from another perspective and question what they’ve been told about history by textbooks and teachers.

I realize that I keep talking about how books are “fun to read” – I’m a firm believer that reading should be fun. Fun to me means that I discover new, interesting ideas that I didn’t know before, and that cause me to think about the world differently, either from a factual perspective – as in this case – or from an emotional perspective, as Fiction does. Maybe that’s not your idea of fun, but it’s mine.