States Feel Obliged To Legislate History Lawmakers Require Teaching Of Certain Events

Ireland’s potato famine changed New York forever.

The Great Hunger of the 1840s drove more than a million Irish to New York’s shores - immigrants who quickly stamped their culture and values on their new land, building railroads and cathedrals, becoming police officers and politicians.

Under a state law signed last week, all public school students over 8 must be taught about the mass starvation in Ireland. A 1994 law already requires that New York schoolchildren learn about slavery, the Holocaust and genocide.

New York has taken the approach further than most, but other states also require students to be taught about certain historical events.

The question, for many educators and historians, is whether any of these tragedies should be written into the law.

“This business of each group getting its own victimization written into legislation is a very bizarre way of studying history,” said Eric Foner, a history professor at Columbia University. “As a historian and a teacher, I believe that people ought to know about the Irish famine. But I’m not thrilled about the state legislature deciding what should be considered historically important.”

Assemblyman Joseph Crowley of New York City said he sponsored the legislation because the potato famine “had a tremendous effect on the United States, but particularly in the state of New York. A great many of those people came here.”

An estimated 40 million Americans claim Irish ancestry, and many can trace their roots directly to ancestors who fled the famine.

In Florida, state law requires the teaching of the Holocaust in schools. Montana’s Constitution recognizes the distinct nature of American Indian culture and declares the state’s commitment “in its educational goals to the preservation of their cultural integrity.”

In New Jersey, the Irish famine and the Armenian genocide were added to the curriculum this year as part of a 1994 law that requires the study of the Holocaust and genocide in general.

That move upset some Jewish leaders, who argued that including other atrocities dilutes the horror of the Holocaust. Turkish-Americans, meanwhile, objected to the Armenian curriculum guide, which blames the Ottoman Turks for the deaths of more than 1 million Armenians in 1915.

Apart from the question of which historical events to single out for special treatment, there is the issue of which interpretation should be taught.

In the case of the Irish famine, historians disagree about the British government’s reaction to the crisis and whether the potato blight alone killed 1 million people and led 2 million others to emigrate. There was food in the country, but it didn’t get to the poor.

Crowley, sponsor of the New York law, said that England used hunger “as a tool of subjugation.” And in signing the bill, Gov. George Pataki spoke of the “deliberate campaign by the British to deny the Irish people the food they needed to survive.”

But Robert Scally, director of Ireland House at New York University and author of a book on the famine, said that the famine began as a natural disaster, making its legislative connection to the Holocaust and slavery “very dubious.”

In the classroom, said Ron Davis of the United Federation of Teachers in New York, good teachers will continue to use all sorts of examples, including the famine and the Holocaust, to teach about starvation and human rights.

“Educators don’t have to have this mandated,” he said. “They know what to teach.”