I suppose this is mostly for Americans who went through public schools but anyone that grew up in a state/province system is welcome.
I grew up right on the Louisiana/Texas border. We had to take a full year class in Louisiana history I believe in 8th grade. This wasn’t much of a problem because Louisiana has a very interesting history with all that French and Spanish stuff as well as the antebellum South, the Civil War, through Huey Long and beyond. We had real textbooks and all had to stand up in front of the class and recite the 64 parishes and name the state tree (the water loving bald cypress) among other things.
Our nearby Texas friends had to take Texas history as well which isn’t that surprising considering that Texas people tend to pop a huge boner for anything that lets them talk about Texas more.
However, my wife didn’t have a Massachusetts history course presumably because it is so closely tied with American history. I can definitely see that but what about kids that live in Iowa or Oregon? There might be a content issue I suspect.
Did you have a mandatory state history class in school?
Yup, we did either a quarter of half a year in 4th grade on Maine history, and the entire year in 7th Grade. Wanna know the 16 Maine counties? I can sing them to the tune of “Yankee Doodle”.
I’ve lived in several states for varying periods of time, so…
Florida, kindergarten through second grade: No.
California, second through fifth grade: Yes. We learned a lot about Junipero Serra and the building of the missions.
Rhode Island, fifth and sixth: A bit, as I recall, but nothing overly fascinating. Nothing you wouldn’t learn in a general canvas of Revolutionary War history.
Virginia, sixth: Not as I recall.
Mississippi, seventh: Quite a bit. We had to learn the various Indian tribes native to the area and their respective cultures. We learned about the various conquests of the area as well. I recall the day my teacher brought in a can of hominy, as few of the students had ever tasted it.
Texas, eighth on: Not as much as you might think. I was a bit late; apparently they’d had Texas history in seventh grade. We have a lot of interesting history down here, though, you must admit…
In theory, I was supposed to have a New Mexico history class (as part of another class) in 7th grade. Middle school is a really lousy time to make kids take a pretty boring history class (actually, NM history is quite interesting, but the class itself was awful) and I don’t think we did much of it anyway. I’ve tried to block out most of everything that happened to me in school from ages 12-14 anyway.
Third grade (1968). Don’t know if it’s still done. The main thing I remember was our history book (“Simms” was the name, I think) contained this little ditty.
We had Virginia history in the fourth grade, I think. (Very sanitized Virginia history that glossed over most of the nastier aspects of the Jamestown colony and slavery; I’m thinking that eighth grade might be a better time for that sort of thing.)
I grew up / went to school in Portland, Oregon. When I attended, there weren’t any mandatory courses in high school. Curriculum-wise, in elementary and middle school (Jr. High), though, there was.
I specifically remember curriculum having to do with the founding of the state, the city, Clark & Lewis, the Oregon Trail (awesome game, BTW). In middle school we learned a bit about the job sectors in Oregon and how they came to exist (farming, logging, specialized industry, etc.).
A full year of it in seventh grade in Texas…um…'87-'88 school year, I think. Texas does have interesting history, at least, though I didn’t appreciate it at the time. The next year we got American history. After all, which is more important? g
My kids had a year of (pretty diluted) Ohio history somewhere around the end of Elementary or beginning of Middle School. The kids in normal classes might have had something more nearly resembling an actual class.
I never had a state history class in Michigan, but I am old and went to parochial elementary school that spanned the 50s and 60s, for equal duration. (Actually, in fourth grade, we had some sort of social studies class on Michigan. We had to identify populations, industry, the locations of agricultural and industrial products, and similar matters, but not history, per se.)
High School, Jacksonville, Florida 1972-73 – one semester of Florida History. The book was from 1958. I remember the exciting photo of the Miami airport with a bunch of prop planes sitting on the runway.
I did a parochial elementary and public school for junior and senior high, no state history classes at all. We did do some noodling around in social studies I think, learning about what crops, industry, ecology the state has, that type of stuff but nothing historical that I remember.
My son’s going into the tenth grade, all public schooling, and he hasn’t had state history either.
