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 spir...
History, despite its wrenching pain, Cannot be unlived, and if faced With courage, need not be lived again. —MAYA ANGELOU
History, despite its wrenching pain, Cannot be unlived, and if faced With courage, need not be lived again. —MAYA ANGELOU1
Once you have learned how to ask questions—relevant and appropriate and substantial questions—you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know. —NE...
New England, would face no real Indian challenge. Indeed, the plague helped prompt the legendarily warm reception Plymouth enjoyed from the Wampanoags. Massasoit, the Wampanoag leader, was eager to al...
When history textbooks leave out the Arawaks, they offend Native Americans. When they omit the possibility of African and Phoenician precursors to Columbus, they offend African Americans. When they gl...
These Americans believed that one great male god ruled the world. Sometimes they divided him into three parts, which they called father, son, and holy ghost. They ate crackers and wine or grape juice,...
Official state historical markers form a smaller population, and early in my research I determined to read all of them. Texas dissuaded me. The Lone Star state has more state historical markers—nearly...
It is always useful to think badly about people one has exploited or plans to exploit.
He is a lover of his country who rebukes and does not excuse its sins. —FREDERICK DOUGLASS
Baptist minister and inventor Burrell Cannon (1848–1922) led some Pittsburg investors to establish the Ezekiel Airship Company and build a craft described in the Biblical book of Ezekiel. The ship had...
As Benjamin Franklin put it, No European who has tasted Savage Life can afterwards bear to live in our societies.48
Our goal must be to help students uncover the past rather than cover it. Instead of teaching the book, teachers must develop a list of 30–50 topics they want to teach in their U.S. history course. Eve...
Of course the people do not want war. . . . But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democr...
Not only do textbooks fail to blame the federal government for its opposition to the civil rights movement, many actually credit the government, almost single-handedly, for the advances made during th...
Native Americans also insist that squaw is a derogatory term. Some believe it derives from a French corruption of an Iroquois epithet for vagina, analogous to cunt in English. Others believe it meant...
If you truly want students to take an interest in American history, then stop lying to them.
Hitler admired our concentration camps for American Indians in the west and according to John Toland, his biographer, often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination—by sta...
The Civil War had been about something other than states’ rights after all. It began as a war to force or prevent the breakup of the United States.
Socialization is not primarily cognitive. We are not persuaded rationally not to pee in the living room; we are not to. We then rationalize and obey this rule even when no authority figure lurks to e...