From a Brit point of view, I learned a lot about The Wars of The Roses and Henry 8. We also covered the Industrial Revolution and the Peasant’s Revolt. But little was said about WW1 or 2 and the causes thereof.
Kids today learn nothing about The British Empire’s rule in India or slavery in the Caribbean. No mention of the Korean War. Suez or even the Irish ‘troubles’.
They need to learn about why some people hate us so much that they will suicide bomb a concert, or fly planes into skyscapers.
Perhaps not. But I do believe the Puritan story is a really poor foundation myth. Roger Williams and Rhode Island are a better match for American propaganda. The Puritans were about as un-American as you can get. Much of the story is a lie. I found it to be unconvincing.
It might be productive to teach the history of the American continent rather than Northern Europe as leading up to our foundation. There were major civilizations here that should not be ignored. Also the Spanish southwest was evolving sometimes faster than the north east. Onate is more important than Hudson. The communities at Val Verde and Santa Fe stopped Confederate access to Colorado gold. The Pueblos successfully revolted against Europeans in 1680.
I’d approach slavery slightly differently. Our ‘problem’ didn’t arise from slavery. The problem was our failure to absorb the black immigrant population. The problem is basic racism not any latent result of slavery.
War is a property of modern societies. How do you treat the good guy/bad guy problem?
I wonder if my teacher had real discretion over the curriculum. I know there was discretion in how to present the lessons and content, but I was always under the impression that the list of topics to be covered were handed down from on high. We had statewide standardized end-of-course exams (EOCs) which were worth 30% of our final grade, so if nothing after 1969 was on that test…
Now that I think of it, the EOC benchmarks definitively describe which parts of U.S. history (from the civil war on; ancient times thru the early 1800s would have been covered on the midterm) the state of Florida has decided are the most “important” for kids to know: https://www.fldoe.org/core/fileparse.php/5662/urlt/0077550-fl09sp_us_history.pdf#page=66
Today it looks like it covers thru the Nixon administration. So from specific benchmarks like this
Analyze significant foreign policy events during the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations
Analyze causes, course, and consequences of the Vietnam War
Examine the similarities of social movements (Native Americans, Hispanics, women, antiwar protesters) of the 1960s and 1970s
Analyze the attempts to extend New Deal legislation through the Great Society and the successes and failures of these programs to promote social and economic stability.
Analyze the significance of Vietnam and Watergate on the government and people of the United States.
To more vague benchmarks like this for anything from Ford on
Analyze the foreign policy of the United States as it relates to Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Latin America, and the Middle East.
Analyze political, economic, and social concerns that emerged at the end of the 20th century and into the 21st century.
Analyze the effects of foreign and domestic terrorism on the American people.
~Max
It’s so hard to understand that America hasn’t even begun to address the question and elected a white supremacist president who praised Robert E. Lee, the Klan and Nazis. That’s how hard it is to understand.
Yep, those are fairly standard standards (Hah.) and benchmarks. They determine, fairly broadly, what students should know and be able to do at or by certain grade levels. How to get students TO those standards is the stuff of curriculum: which specifics are taught, how are they taught, what materials will be used, and how student learning is assessed are all local curriculum decisions.
For instance, if you look at the Florida standard concerning analyzing significant foreign policy events through those five administrations, you’ll see that U.S. history teachers at the same grade level still need to discuss and decide which foreign policy events are significant, what teaching methods will be used, and how student learning will be assessed. (Projects? Essays? Tests?) Believe me, those sessions can get pretty heated.
What got me most interested in history during high school were my English courses. When we read Arthurian tales, Greek mythology, or Beowulf, the teacher would sometimes have to explain why one particular passage was important and how it related to attitudes of the story’s contemporary audience. I believe a lot of younger people aren’t interested in history because they can’t relate to it. And it’s boring to boot.
What if their family history is until quite recently in another part of the world?
I graduated high school in 1969, and our history classes always stopped right before WWII.
I’ve never been quite sure whether they didn’t want to bother updating the cirriculum, or whether they delibarately didn’t want to teach anything recent enough that it might cause division within the classroom.
I don’t know if they’d say it out loud. It’s just . . . easier to not get into issues in which the students, or even their parents, were themselves involved.
A lot of what was all around me as I grew up was things I had at best a very limited perspective on at the time.
Limiting discussion of slavery, in courses on US history, to that sort of description would be a very limited perspective indeed; and not useful for its long-term impact on this country specifically.
This.
And also: teach how all this affected the day-to-day lives of a variety of people. What makes history classes boring is teaching the dates without teaching the people – and teaching only the handful of people who thought they were running the place is nearly as boring as teaching only the dates.
Oklahoma just passed a law saying all HS students need to pass with a 60 to graduate, but they can start in 8th. My district decided we’ll give it primarily in 8th grade US history, as we cover history through reconstruction (though not the 1900s stuff they ask) and all the civics stuff.
We broke it into 4 sets of 25 questions, and I gave part 4 yesterday. 90% of all my students are passing, with a few more who have to take one or more parts.
I’ve worked with teachers from several states. This simply isn’t a factor. These days, teaching kids about slavery or the Civil Rights Movement is fraught with controversy and potential targeting by the anti-education crowd. It’s certainly not just more current issues.
Oh, if people only knew how much time teachers spend on curriculum! It HAS to be updated as content standards change, but it’s also changed (and hopefully improved) on a near-constant basis. I hear parents complain because kids get out early or start late one day a week: that’s time teachers meet to work on curriculum.
Honestly, the reason high school US History classes don’t get as far as they should is because some schools/teachers cling to teaching US History chronologically. I went to school in the 60s and 70s, and my classes never got to WWII. It wasn’t due to lazy or frightened teachers: it was because they slavishly followed the textbooks, which were chronologically organized. They simply run out of time. This is not the case when courses are thematically taught. You cover the entirety of US history of immigration, for instance, up to and including the present day.
Makes sense. I was talking at least mostly about the 1960’s, though.
Except “they simply run out of time” about 20 years before whenever the particular students are in class. They ran out of time before WWII, when it was the 60’s. They ran out of time before Vietnam, when it was the 80’s. And so on . . .
If not all schools are doing that, and/or weren’t doing that, I’m glad (and not all that surprised; some schools have always done better than others.) Aren’t there also problems with teaching thematically, though? I’d think it would be difficult to properly teach about immigration in the 1600’s and 1700’s and 1800’s and by now at least most of the 1900’s without simultaneously teaching a lot of the rest of the history of the time.
Several posters have mentioned running out of time in their classes before reaching “modern history”. I remember that this was a thing in all subjects, and was called “the back of the book” problem. Maybe there should be a semester devoted to finishing all those books.
Back on topic - I’d like kids to know about some of the crazier aspects of the American scene, such as Brinkley and implantation of goat glands (and the subsequent story of the failed election campaign). Kids should know that people back then were just as liable to fall into the same kinds of traps that we do today.
Well but then part of this is also an issue with every time trying to do the whole megillah again from the start. Maybe we should do US History by stages across multiple semesters with minimal overlap recaps in the first couple of weeks.
Should probably do a grade school version and a high school version, though.
Oh for sure. That’s why I said to make it so you know the “basic” history they use in the citizenship test by the time you enter HS (e.g. at least know in what order major things happened and who was involved), so in HS you can go for more nuance or theme focus.
?? “The black immigrant population” in the early US existed mostly BECAUSE of the practice of enslaving Africans. And the institution of African enslavement was the chief driver of anti-Black racism in American society. I don’t see how you can possibly separate the two phenomena.
By what metric? Sure, there has been slavery in most human societies throughout pre-modern history, but I’d like to see a cite explaining in what way and in what period enslaved people constituted “the primary international commodity”.
AFAICT, the overwhelming majority of people enslaved in the course of US history (which is the topic of this thread) were of Black African descent.
Yes, it was one segment of a much larger market, and should be studied in that context. The slave market in New Mexico survived long after those in the southeast US.
The emphasis of education should be on the failure of the US to assimilate the immigrant black population.
International slavery is covered here
The most important thing to learn about history in general is that humans never really learn from their mistakes. We keep treating each other like crap, forcing our own morals, religions and ways of life upon other groups of people who, if they resist, are subjugated or annihilated. U.S. history is just another story of more of the same, with some variations on the theme. History is about human behavior and what motivates us to do what we do. It’s not about a war that was fought; it’s about what led to that war and how that compares to what led to other wars. If all we take away from all the killing is “America! Fuck yeah!”, then our country will never be more than a footnote, like every other empire of the past.
What, too bleak?
As I (and others) have said, though, and as your cited sources confirm, the practice of slavery in the history of the U.S., which is the subject of this thread, was overwhelmingly dominated by the enslavement of Black Africans.
(Your cited sources don’t seem to address your claim that human slaves were “the primary international commodity prior to the industrial revolution”, btw; still interested in seeing a cite for that bit.)
The wider history of slavery is important to mention for context, but it would be delusional to pretend that the enslavement of Black Africans isn’t uniquely central and important in the history of the US in ways that other forms of slavery are not. The enslavement of Black Africans and their descendants is what the US enshrined in law, and is what at least half the US built an entrenched social and economic system upon, and is what the US fought a catastrophic civil war about, and is what underlies the uniquely oppressive treatment of people of Black African descent in the US right up through the mid-20th century, and to a lesser extent up to the present day.
It would be absurd to try to downplay that huge historical impact as merely “one segment of a much larger market”. If you were teaching a course on the phenomenon of human enslavement throughout human history, then sure, that would be a valid approach. But if you’re teaching a course on US history specifically, then obviously the single most significant manifestation of human enslavement is the racially-based chattel slavery system legally imposed on Black Africans in particular.
That still seems like an irrational and pointless deflection from the historical reality. Especially in its use of the term “immigrant” to describe kidnapped and enslaved Africans forcibly brought to the New World. Do you describe European slaves traded in the Ottoman Empire as “the immigrant European population”?
Common wisdom goes,“history repeats itself”.
Now that I think about it, none of my history teachers ever uttered that phrase in class. Most of them would make it a point to say, “those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Churchill, I think. One teacher, however, quoted Santayana directly: “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
~Max
This is why The Lost Cause is a thing. I would prefer Americans knew almost nothing about The Civil War than ‘why my great grand daddy was in the right’.
I suspect the anger over CRT is not just misunderstanding used to stoke a culture war but the acknowledgment kids grandparents are in some of those Civil Rights Movement pictures and not on the right side of history.