The antidote to feel-good history is not feel-bad history but honest and inclusive history. If textbook authors feel compelled to give good moral instruction, the way origin myths have always done, th...
The textbooks also fail to show how the continuous Indian wars have reverberated through our culture. Carleton Beals has written that our acquiescence in Indian dispossession has molded the American c...
Many African societies divide humans into three categories: those still alive on the earth, the sasha, and the zamani. The recently departed whose time on earth overlapped with people still here are t...
No matter how thoroughly Native Americans acculturated, they could not succeed in white society. Whites would not let them. Indians were always regarded as aliens, and were rarely allowed to live with...
On Ho Chi Minh's desk in Hanoi on the day he died lay a biography of John Brown.
The Truth can set us free.
Rethinking Our Past: Recognizing Facts, Fiction, and Lies in American History Social Science in the Courtroom
Many sundown towns had not a single black household as late as the 2000 census, and some still openly exclude to this day.
Another result of the War of 1812 was the loss of part of our history. As historian Bruce Johansen put it, A century of learning [from Native Americans] was coming to a close. A century and more of fo...
What a community erects on its historical landscape not only sums up its view of the past but also influences its possible futures.
The historian must have no country. —JOHN QUINCY ADAMS
Very few adults today realize that our society has been slave much longer than it has been free.
History is furious debate informed by evidence and reason.
Repression of white ethnic groups; again, most textbooks blame the people,
Consider how textbooks treat Native religions as a unitary whole. ... "These Native Americans ... believed that nature was filled with spirits. Each form of life, such as plants and animals, had a spi...
People have a right to their own opinions, but not to their own facts.
In sum, U.S. history is no more violent and oppressive than the history of England, Russia, Indonesia, or Burundi - but neither is it exceptionally less violent.
The 27 candidates for whom I could readily distinguish the racial policies of their hometowns, one-third were identified with sundown towns. Starting at the beginning of the century, these include Rep...
Ironically, Adolf Hitler displayed more knowledge of how we treated Native Americans than American high schoolers today who rely on their textbooks. Hitler admired our concentration camps for American...
Paulo Freire of Brazil puts it this way: It would be extremely naïve to expect the dominant classes to develop a type of education that would enable subordinate classes to perceive social injustices c...