I don’t remember what I got taught in elementary school, but my AP history text was Growth of the American Republc by Morrison and Commager, which didn’t leave out any labor strife. The first volume, by Morrison, was so well written that I was done with it long before the class ended - it was a pleasure to read.
The textbooks my kids had in high school were awful, but not because of leaving out any dark spots in our history. For the AP test we got our oldest daughter a good book covering all of American history (not a text) - she read it and passed easily.
Perhaps it is because my kids have four or five more chapters to read than I did.
The problem is the format we teach history in. It’s so much repetition of a few useless facts that we try to get everyone to know. So little time is devoted to it and the way we teach it doesn’t really help people understand history’s broad sweeps.
When Benjamin Franklin was born or the precise date of the Tet Offensive is irrelevant, you can look that stuff up. Hell in my history classes we usually didn’t have time to study the 20th century at the end of the school year.
History classes should start with the present and work backwards, not start with the dawn of civilization and work forward. The fact that more people know who Hammurabi is than know who Nasser was, is just downright silliness.
That’s an interesting idea, but since history builds on itself, I don’t see how you’d implement it. Maybe you’d start with important issues of today (problems in the MidEast, for example) and find the historical background for them.
The reason I enjoyed HS history was that our teacher assumed we’d read the book, so class time was pretty much wholly devoted to the historical sweep stuff. The textbooks today have their pages taken up with disconnected facts, lots of pictures, breakout boxes and wide margins, which I suppose make it readable but eliminates the space needed for putting anything worth reading in it.
Well the thing I found out is that 9th grade history was barely different from 8th grade history. Essentially they pounded in the same basic facts.
When I was a senior I took Honors World History, which was a sophomore level class due to skipping around from school to school. I slept in class EVERY SINGLE DAY, which my teacher allowed me to do because I would ace the tests.
History in HS is a freaking joke, at least it was where I went to school.
I don’t think I had an actual “history” class in high school. IIRC for my 3 history credits I did:
-ELP (Economics, Legal, and Political; study of government)
-World Cultures
-Bible History (which turned out would’ve been more accurately titled “church”)
I went to high school around the turn of the century in a very small school, but I thought a got a very good history education the one year I had to take a history class. We covered things like Wounded Knee and Haymarket and US involvement in Latin America in pretty good detail. It wasn’t a bash America class by any means. My teacher was more liberal than any professor I had in college, though.
I do think things like the 19th and early 20th century labor movement should be covered more in schools where it isn’t. It’s a good way to have kids actually relate to history since the strikers and union members are people a lot like them, being the beginning middle class they live in today. Whereas a lot of historical figures were either born into or ended up in a upper class lifestyle.
Really? What’s the point, because I don’t get it. We offered to buy it, they said no, we went to war and took it. Sure maybe this is called “conquering” but how is it distinguishable from “stealing”?
My smiley was in enjoyment of the semantic nitpick. It is no different, but it sounds better. I’m not defending his casting of “conquering” as moral at the time. There were, in fact, many in the U.S. - Thoreau, Lincoln, and Grant leap to mind - who believed that a war of conquest was immoral.
I am getting in on this real late but anymore they are just Indian. I grew up in South Dakota on/next to 2 reservations (Lakota Sioux). AFAIK, there are very few full bloods left. I know people who appear to be full-blood and others who are blue-eyed & blond. All of them consider themselves Indian. My best friend is only 1/16th but considers himself Indian because he is a registered member of the tribe and “all you crackers call me an Indian anyway”.
The area around my hometown was orginally Arikara land. The Sioux arrived relatively late and roamed widely with the coming of the horse. The Arikara were devasted by disease and the few descendants were put on the same reservation as the Mandan. History is complicated and not pretty.
There is a difference. We stole the land from the government of Mexico, but we didn’t steal the land from the individual landowners. If you owned a farm in Arizona before the Mexican-American war, you still owned that farm after the Mexican-American war. You weren’t turned out of your farm so that it could be given to white farmers. The only difference is that your farm was now part of the United States of America instead of the United States of Mexico.
Note that a fair amount of out-and-out land stealing did take place, like the Trail of Tears and other wars against indians. In those cases the people who lived on a particular piece of land were forced off at gunpoint. But that sort of ethnic cleansing wasn’t what happened when Mexico ceded territory to the US.
On paper, maybe. In practice it did not work like this. Lots and lots of land was out and out stolen from individuals. What do you think happened when the Gold Rush came to California, or when silver, tin, nickel, and other resources were discovered in Arizona and Nevada? The Mexicans living on top of that stuff were just allowed to go on about their lives? Hah. Best case scenario was that they were moved off to one corner of the property and made to live in a hut and work the mine for less than a living wage. And that came later. In the early days they were just told to scram or killed. And regardless, what if Mexico came and “conquered” South Carolina tomorrow? Everyone could theoretically stay where they were at, on paper, but they were now Mexicans and lived under Mexican rule. People would be clawing their eyes out in outrage. It’d be World War 3, 4, and 5 at the same time. At best, “conquered” vs. “stolen” is a semantic difference in this case, and IMO a disingenuous one. Don’t piss on someone and tell them it’s raining.
For many Americans those words just recall tales like:
[Chris Berman]
The cheese heads of Green Bay vs. the pirates with pewter pants of Tampa Bay!
[/Chris Berman]
Like **Cisco **mentioned, even the Mexican Land owners of California that supported the US lost almost everything, like Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo
Even though he was made prisoner and almost died in the custody of John C. Frémont, Vallejo still supported the US government, eventually cities in California and even an American submarine are named in his honor.
However, as this is related to the subject, it should not come as a surprise that what happened to the Mexicans in the conquered territories is not mentioned in the American History textbook of 2005.
Conquest or a robbery? It should be mentioned that even the History book points to one important factor that caused the war:
President Polk felt **insulted **that Mexico did not take the offer to buy the land from the US.
As another doper mentioned recently, the war was like if Mexico was a guy that was getting into his car and suddenly a crook points a gun at him and the crook also has a 10 dollar bill in his hand. Then the crook says to the Mexican: “Take the money and give me the car!”
The fact that the crook gave money for the car does not remove the fact that a robbery still took place.
To come back to this. History builds on itself because we teach it that way, we could teach it via a regressive deconstruction starting from this point in time, it would simply be a different method. The kids need to know what’s going on now to see any relevance in the history, and that’s something they roundly failed to inculcate in me personally in my history curriculum, and I was one of those kids that ‘liked’ history class.
Point taken.