The answer is not to expand Lies My Teacher Told Me to cover every distortion and error in history as traditionally taught, to say nothing of the future lies yet to be developed. That approach would m...
When you see a roadside marker, take in what it tells but also ask, how might this be wrong? One giveaway is the use of qualifying phrases introducing statements of fact, as in: According to tradition...
A generic National Park Service (NPS) brochure promises children, Hidden within each national park is an exciting story waiting to be discovered. Learning the secrets of each national park is easy. Si...
Surely the desired end product of high school U.S. history courses is graduates who can think clearly, distinguish evidence from opinion, and separate truth from what comedian Stephen Colbert famously...
Sundown town police forces, in addition to being all-white, may still be viewed by themselves and other residents as a city’s first line of defense against black interlopers. As a result, they engage...
History textbooks still present Union and Confederate sympathizers as equally idealistic. The North fought to hold the Union together, while the South fought, according to 'The American Way', 'for the...
Everyone named in our history made a positive contribution (except John Brown, as the next chapter shows). Or as Frances FitzGerald put it when she analyzed textbooks in 1979, In all history, there is...
Recovering the memory of the increasing oppression of African Americans during the first half of the twentieth century can deepen our understanding of the role racism has played in our society and con...
Consider a white ninth-grade student taking American history in a predominantly middle-class town in Vermont. Her father tapes Sheetrock, earning an income that in slow construction seasons leaves the...
Europeans were always trying to stop the outflow. Hernando de Soto had to post guards to keep his men and women from defecting to Native societies. The Pilgrims so feared Indianization that they made...
Critical thinking requires assembling data to back up one’s opinion. Otherwise students may falsely conclude that all opinions are somehow equal.
Students exit history textbooks without having developed the ability to think coherently about social life. Even
When students are not asked to assess, but only to remember, they do not learn how to assess or how to think for themselves.
Socially, segregation labeled African Americans as less than human; the term boy itself, applied to the Scottsboro defendants even as they became elderly, implied that they were less than men.
Americans need to learn from the Wilson era, that there is a connection between racist presidential leadership and like-minded public response.
What You Can Do About Sundown Towns: The Three-Step Program in Action To help sundown towns transcend their pasts and end second-generation sundown town issues, I suggest a Three-Step Program: •Admit...
Old myths never die—they just become embedded in the textbooks. —THOMAS BAILEY
The antidote to feel-good history is not feel-bad history but honest and inclusive history.
It is not too much to say that the blacks in Georgia and the Carolinas made Sherman’s march possible. Their help meant that Sherman’s forces would not be traveling through hostile territory without su...
We jettisoned our medical practices of the 1780s while retaining the Constitution. But Native American medicinal practitioners who abandon their traditional ways to embrace pasteurization from France...
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