It was the selective service. Basically, a database just in case they did decide to enact a draft.
Sort of a pre-draft.
Yes. Plus civil rights, women’s rights, human rights. The Cold War, Vietnam.
It was a real one for me, although it would end a couple of years later and inductions had stopped already.
America is and always has been and always will be the greatest country in the world and it has never done anything wrong and on the rare occasions it has made mistakes it was because of sabotage by anti American enemies and the problems were instantly corrected because it has always had the purest of intentions and anyone who says differently is a dirty socialist commie anarchist antifa traitor hoo-ra. Now stand for the Pledge.
The A-Team should be up there.
I took AP US History in 2000, and Watergate was just after the cutoff for what was going to be on the test. We didn’t get much about Vietnam or the Nixon years in the official curriculum, but our teacher shared plenty of personal anecdotes about having been in the SDS during college and being in Detroit during the 1967 riot.
So, no mention of slavery?
I’m sure that’s at least partly true, but also, I think history (or the history of some particular country or topic) is a subject that becomes more interesting the more you already know about it. To kids who come in with little-to-no background knowledge, the people and places and dates and events aren’t going to be nearly as meaningful because they don’t have any context to put them into.
This thread is about the “most important” things to know, which I interpret to mean “if you know nothing else, at least know this.” But if you know nothing else, it’s harder to relate to or care about those few things.
I didn’t say no mention of it. It’s not hard to explain slavery. It is a big part of our history so it would get mentioned repeatedly in the basic set of events of American history.
Well, you said “Everything that happened before [the 20th century] has little application to the lives of people now.” Slavery was the biggest and most obvious counterexample that sprang to my mind.
But I will grant you this: history teachers too often give short shrift to the more recent events of the 20th (and 21st) century. Partly this is because they teach history chronologically and run out of time. And it may be partly because more recent events are harder to teach fairly and impartially. But partly, I suspect, it’s because they don’t think of things that happened during their own lifetimes as “history” but as “current events”: stuff everybody knows about because they lived through it. Except that the kids they’re teaching didn’t live through it.
Some times, I feel like I’d settle for that by the time you make it into High School, you could pass the citizenship naturalization test questions. I get this strong suspicion every so often that half my “natural born” compatriots would tank if forced to take it.
This is precisely why my colleagues and I taught US History thematically. Also, it’s much easier for students to understand connections between events that way. There’s no perfect way to teach US History, but not covering the last 50+ years is a real disservice to students.
Providing context and making it interesting and meaningful to students who may have no background or who’ve forgotten what they learned because it wasn’t taught in a way that engaged them is also part of a teacher’s job.
That is correct. Yes, older events can be shown to have an effect on our lives now, by following the course of history to the present. It would rarely be the case that 19th century events directly impact peoples lives today. But it’s not slavery directly affecting people to today, it is the events that continued after the end of institutional slavery into the 20th century that make the difference. The effects of slavery didn’t end with the Civil War, which was the sanitized version of history I was taught in school, and they continued on into the 20th century where they did have that kind of direct effect on people’s lives.
While remaining objective would undoubtedly be difficult for some teachers, I’ve never heard of anyone using that as an excuse for organizing curriculum so that students don’t learn about more recent events. It’d certainly be a terrible rationalization.
Nope. That is, you’d have to be a truly terroble teacher who never attended curriculum sessions to have that mindset., and younger teachers would cover more ground than teachers even 5 or 10 years older. Current events are always events that are, you know, happening currently.
And the kids, themselves, are a reminder. As an example, the first several years after the 9/11 attacks, we’d get into the subjectby discussing where the kids were and how they reacted to those events. But naturally, each year the current crop of students were younger when 9/11 happened, so their understanding of the events of that time was at a younger level, e.g., they remembered their parents crying but didn’t understand enough to cry, themselves. By the end of my career, kids had no memory of the events. All the kids, including those who were in history class in 2002, had a lot to learn about the attacks and the background, and those in class in 2002 had to move from a personal context to a more global one. What changed was how we got into the subject.
Here you hit the nail on the head.
That’s okay. I graduated in 1970 and U.S history sort of ended with World War II. No Korea, no Cold War, no Civil Rights movement, no Sputnik, no JFK assassination.
In fairness, we didn’t really need a history class to teach us about all of that, since we grew up with it all around us.
What’s important for kids to know? That’s an enormous topic. But a few items come to mind:
Replace all the Puritan nonsense with the founding of Rhode Island as our foundation myth.
Structure education on the history of US labor rather than the political history of northern Europe
Brigham Young created a US state by importing a labor force of 87,000 Europeans. The controversy over the admission of Utah as a Communitarian Theocracy is the best example of states rights as an issue.
Slavery should be recognized as the primary international commodity prior to the industrial revolution. Similar to oil today, Most enslaved people were not black Africans.
“It shouldn’t take long to go through the timeline and point out the major events. Some of the details may be interesting like life in colonial times and the lives and accomplishments of most presidents, but I think those things aren’t that important to spend much time on until we get to the 20th century. Everything that happened before then has little application to the lives of people now….”
I completely disagree. Slavery is the foundational institution from which all the rest of American culture and history has sprung. There cannot be any understanding of the US without understanding slavery, the civil war it caused and the echos of slavery that permeate all aspects of American life to this day.
I don’t know if I’d go 100% in this direction, but absolutely labor history should be central to our curriculum, alongside slavery and civil rights and suffrage.
Some warfare needs to be taught, but it’s much more important for kids to know about historical trends and important thinkers than to know about dates of battles and order of presidents. Teach about the fight for the eight-hour workday and why Prohibitionism was such a big deal; get kids to understand the fundamental conditions of slavery and how they distorted thinking about everything from race to labor to immigration to freedom; explore the gradual change from women-as-property to women-as citizens; learn about redlining and gentrification; teach the tension between Malcolm X and MLK.
The Battle of Little Big Horn can wait.
Okay. How hard is that to understand. What do you do in the rest of the class? I would jump to the echoes of slavery that permeate all aspects of American life to this day.
ETA: What I would do is go through the events of history as quickly as that up into the 20th century, and start in on the details to events recent enough that students will need to know more about in the lives they have ahead of them. That doesn’t mean ignoring anything, but the bulk of the time needs to be spent on the history directly applicable to their lives.
I would want better teaching about the War of 1812.
In school it seemed to me that the US kicked butt and took names all over the place, when in fact things were so much more nuanced than that.
I would want students to see the importance of that war as a “coming of age” of our adolescent country, and the turning point when the UK and other nations began to take us seriously and treat us as a sovereign nation.
I would also want them to understand just how badly the Brits kicked our butts all over the place (the White House was burned down!), and that it was more logistics and distractions from France that saved us from the full brunt than our own awesomeness.
And the underfunded fledgling Navy did some cool stuff with minimal resources!
Here’s a good book on the subject: 1812: The Navy’s War