The 1619 Project

[garbon]

Moving to its own thread as this isn't really about Trump's presidency.

Do you have proof of these assertions? The people you talk about in your 2nd paragraph can't have been adversely affected by the 1619 project as it only launched in 2019.

For some people, any critical view of their country is seen as Raz describes it.

Racism is still well alive in this country and never far from the political mainstream.

The 1619 Project had flaws in how it told history, centering everything on slavery was certainly wrong, but we can't ignore that it played a large role in shaping the United States of today.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/inclusive-case-1776-not-1619/604435/
https://byebyepaywall.com/en/

I don't know if you and Raz know this but in the 1619 Project book (I've just started reading it), Nikole Hannah-Jones (the author) has a preface where she explains what she was attempting to do.

As a bit of early background prior to being an adult and creating the 1619 project:

My favorite subjects in school were English and social studies, and I peppered my teachers with questions. History revealed the building blocks of the world I now inhabited, explaining how communities, institutions, relationships came to be. Learning history made the world make sense. It provided the key to decode all that I saw around me.

Black people, however, were largely absent from the histories I read. The vision of the past I absorbed from school textbooks, television, and the local history museum depicted a world, perhaps a wishful one, where Black people did not really exist. This history rendered Black Americans, Black people on all the earth, inconsequential at best, invisible at worst. We appeared only where unavoidable: slavery was mentioned briefly in the chapter on this nation's most deadly war, and then Black people disappeared again for a full century, until magically reappearing as Martin Luther King, Jr., gave a speech about a dream. This quantum leap served to wrap the Black experience up in a few paragraphs and a tidy bow, never really explaining why, one hundred years after the abolition of slavery, King had to lead the March on Washington in the first place.

We were not actors but acted upon. We were not contributors, just recipients. White people enslaved us, and white people freed us. Black people could choose either to take advantage of that freedom or to squander it, as our depictions in the media seemed to suggest so many of us were doing.

Then she establishes some background to our ignorance:

A 2018 report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) called Teaching Hard History found that in 2017 just 8 percent of U.S. high school seniors named slavery as the central cause of the Civil War, and less than one-third knew that it had taken a constitutional amendment to abolish it. The majority of high school students can't tell you that the famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass had once been enslaved; nor can they define the Middle Passage, which led to the forced migration of nearly 13 million people across the Atlantic and transformed—or, arguably, enabled—the existence of the United States.

Considering the confusing and obfuscatory way school curricula tend to address the institution of slavery, this is unsurprising. Myriad examples exist. As recently as six years ago, a McGraw-Hill world geography textbook referred to African people brought to the Americas in the bowels of slave ships not as the victims of a forced migration who were violently coerced into labor but as "workers," a word that implies consensual and paid labor.

Within the last decade, Alabama social studies courses for second graders listed Harriet Tubman, the woman who became famous for escaping slavery and then helping others do the same, as an "exemplary" American without ever mentioning the words "slave" or "slavery." In Texas, which, because of its large population, plays an outsized role in shaping the content of national textbooks, the Republican-led state board of education approved curriculum standards that equated the Confederate general Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson, who fought against the United States government, with Douglass as examples of "the importance of effective leadership in a constitutional republic."

School curricula generally treat slavery as an aberration in a free society, and textbooks largely ignore the way that many prominent men, women, industries, and institutions profited from and protected slavery. Individual enslaved people, as full humans, with feelings, thoughts, and agency, remain largely invisible, but for the occasional brief mention of Douglass or Tubman or George Washington Carver.

One of the reasons American children so poorly understand the history and legacy of slavery is because the adults charged with teaching them don't know it very well, either. A 2019 Washington Post–SSRS poll found that only about half of American adults realize that all thirteen colonies engaged in slavery. Even educators struggle with basic facts of history, the SPLC report found: only about half of U.S. teachers understand that enslavers dominated the presidency in the decades after the founding and would dominate the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Senate until the Civil War.

She then quotes a scholar as to why this is a problem:

"We are committing educational malpractice," says Hasan Kwame Jeffries, a historian at Ohio State University. Jeffries served as chair of the advisory board that produced the Southern Poverty Law Center's Teaching Hard History report. "Our preference for nostalgia and for a history that never happened is not without consequence," Jeffries writes. "Although we teach [students] that slavery happened ... in some cases, we minimize slavery's significance so much that we render its impact—on people and on the nation—inconsequential." This, Jeffries continues, "is profoundly troubling" because it leaves Americans ill-equipped to understand racial inequality today, and that, in turn, leads to intolerance, opposition to efforts to address racial injustice, and the enacting of laws and policies detrimental to Black communities and America writ large. "Our narrow understanding of the institution ... prevents us from seeing this long legacy and leads policymakers to try to fix people instead of addressing the historically rooted causes of their problems," he notes.

And then precisely what she hoped to do with the project:

I made a simple pitch to my editors: The New York Times Magazine should create a special issue that would mark the four-hundredth anniversary by exploring the unparalleled impact of African slavery on the development of our country and its continuing impact on our society. The issue would bring slavery and the contributions of Black Americans from the margins of the American story to the center, where they belong, by arguing that slavery and its legacy have profoundly shaped modern American life, even as that influence had been shrouded or discounted. The issue would pose and answer these questions: What would it mean to reframe our understanding of U.S. history by considering 1619 as our country's origin point, the birth of our defining contradictions, the seed of so much of what has made us unique? How might that reframing change how we understand the unique problems of the nation today—its stark economic inequality, its violence, its world-leading incarceration rates, its shocking segregation, its political divisions, its stingy social safety net? How might it help us understand the country's best qualities, developed over a centuries-long struggle for freedom, equality, and pluralism, a struggle whose DNA could also be traced to 1619? How would looking at contemporary American life through this lens help us better appreciate the contributions of Black Americans—not only to our culture but also to our democracy itself?

Far from becoming nihilists who hate America, she recalls this reception from students:

Black students, especially, told me that for the first time in their lives, they'd experienced a feeling usually reserved for white Americans: a sense of ownership of, belonging in, and influence over the American story. Arterah Griggs, who attended a public high school in Chicago, the first district in the country to make the project part of its curriculum, told a reporter from the Chicago Sun-Times what the project helped her realize: "We were the founding fathers. We put so much into the U.S. and we made the foundation." Another student, Brenton Sykes, said, "Now that I'm aware of the full history of America without it being whitewashed or anything, it kind of makes me see things in a different light. I feel like I have to carry myself better because I have what my ancestors went through."

She also deals with the backlash as accepted ideas in academia met the world. I'll just post a little bit:

The linking of slavery and the American Revolution directly challenged the cornerstone of national identity embedded in our public history, the narratives taught to us in elementary schools, museums and memorials, Hollywood movies, and in many scholarly works as well.

The linking of slavery and the American Revolution directly challenged the cornerstone of national identity embedded in our public history, the narratives taught to us in elementary schools, museums and memorials, Hollywood movies, and in many scholarly works as well.

...

But some who opposed the 1619 Project treated a few scholars' disagreements with certain claims and arguments as justification to dismiss the entire work as factually inaccurate, even as other equally prominent scholars defended and confirmed our facts and interpretations.

In truth, most of the fights over the 1619 Project were never really about the facts. The Princeton historian Allen C. Guelzo, a particularly acerbic critic, published several articles that denounced the 1619 Project for treating "slavery not as a blemish that the Founders grudgingly tolerated ... not as a regrettable chapter in the distant past, but as a living, breathing pattern upon which all American social life is based." Guelzo then made clear that the source of his antipathy was not just what the project was saying but who was saying it: "It is the bitterest of ironies that the 1619 Project dispenses this malediction from the chair of ultimate cultural privilege in America, because in no human society has an enslaved people suddenly found itself vaulted into positions of such privilege, and with the consent—even the approbation—of those who were once the enslavers."

...

The legacy of 1619 surrounds us, whether we acknowledge it or not. This is why, in assembling this book, we have described the history it offers as an origin story. Like all origin stories, this one seeks to explain our society to itself, to give some order to the series of dates, actions, and individuals that created a nation and a people. In doing so, we argue that much about American identity, so many of our nation's most vexing problems, our basest inclinations, and its celebrated and unique cultural contributions spring not from the ideals of 1776 but from the realities of 1619, from the contradictions and the ideological struggles of a nation founded on both slavery and freedom. The story of Black America cannot be disentangled from the story of America, and our attempts to do so have forced us to tell ourselves a tale full of absences, evasions, and lies, one that fails to satisfactorily explain the society we live in and leaves us unable to become the society we want to be.

I'll let you know what I think about it as I read on - but from the preface, it all sounds a lot more complex and nuanced than the caricature I've seen lambasted here.

[viper37]

I'll let you know what I think about it as I read on - but from the preface, it all sounds a lot more complex and nuanced than the caricature I've seen lambasted here.

I've read part of the NY Times piece when it was published.

I don't have a problem with a literary essay who takes liberties with history.  Any great author who has written an historical novel has taken liberties with history.  I am fond of many historical movies and they all take liberties, some more than others, with history.

But what would you say if Ridley Scott's Gladiator was used as the basis for a class on the mid Roman Empire, the gladiatorial life, or simply a biographical account of the Emperor Commodus?

There arise the problem with the 1619 project, imho, when it is used as the basis of a school project despite its many historical mistakes.

Read The Atlantic piece, with the proxy I provided, it alludes to this problem very perfectly, without going all in on the conservative bashing like Raz.  It explains why some historians refused to sign on the project.  I don't agree with everything in it, some things are very silly, but there's a part that is interesting.

Slavery as THE cause of the 1776 rebellion, we've discussed it before.  It was one of the reason, but not the sole factor.

[viper37]

thanks G

[garbon]

I've read part of the NY Times piece when it was published.

I don't have a problem with a literary essay who takes liberties with history.  Any great author who has written an historical novel has taken liberties with history.  I am fond of many historical movies and they all take liberties, some more than others, with history.

But what would you say if Ridley Scott's Gladiator was used as the basis for a class on the mid Roman Empire, the gladiatorial life, or simply a biographical account of the Emperor Commodus?

I'm not sure that is warranted. I think she was aiming for something more noble that the director when questionned about historical accuracy in Napoleon said: "Were you there? Oh you weren't there."

So far I'm not sure if the literary pieces in the book are my favourite but I can understand how different styles of content can be helpful for capturing attention/imagination.

There arise the problem with the 1619 project, imho, when it is used as the basis of a school project despite its many historical mistakes.

Read The Atlantic piece, with the proxy I provided, it alludes to this problem very perfectly, without going all in on the conservative bashing like Raz.  It explains why some historians refused to sign on the project.  I don't agree with everything in it, some things are very silly, but there's a part that is interesting.

Slavery as THE cause of the 1776 rebellion, we've discussed it before.  It was one of the reason, but not the sole factor.

But isn't that throwing the baby out the bath water?

Yes it is unfortunate that she has persisted with that particular claim (which she also mentions in her preface, I just didn't copy fully - I'm also interested to see what her 'toned down' version of the claim is in the book) but I don't think that means it serves no purpose at all. There is still value in broadening/complicating how we think about our history and at a glance it feels like the 1619 project helps with that even if we shouldn't uncritically accept all of its claims.

It isn't like schools that don't use things from the 1619 project are instructing students in the unvarnished truth. As far as I know the vaunting up of the pilgrims and the omissions/obsfucations of America's sins are ongoing.

[viper37]

But isn't that throwing the baby out the bath water?

I never said the entire project should be discarded!

I applaud the effort, like many others.

Without looking at the stats the author provided, you can simply take a look at popular culture to see how the Secession war is portrayed in American minds.  Black people were conspicuously absent until most recently.  Glory must be the only movie where Black Men fight for their freedom.  Otherwise, it's always White men vs White Men fighting to free the Black Men (while it wasn't the case at all).

I've never heard of the Tulsa riots until very recently.  Never heard of many such things, actually.

I think she had a very good idea, a good concept, but she failed in the execution and she should have corrected herself, at least admitted her errors.

I understand the passion, I understand the aims of the work, but it is no excuse to rewrite the history.  As Malthus would often say, two wrongs do not make a right.

[garbon]

Posting this here as probably makes more sense there than in the Britain thread ().

I found this graph interesting as it appears to highlight the importance of intersectionality:

[garbon]

But isn't that throwing the baby out the bath water?

I never said the entire project should be discarded!

I applaud the effort, like many others.

Without looking at the stats the author provided, you can simply take a look at popular culture to see how the Secession war is portrayed in American minds.  Black people were conspicuously absent until most recently.  Glory must be the only movie where Black Men fight for their freedom.  Otherwise, it's always White men vs White Men fighting to free the Black Men (while it wasn't the case at all).

I've never heard of the Tulsa riots until very recently.  Never heard of many such things, actually.

I think she had a very good idea, a good concept, but she failed in the execution and she should have corrected herself, at least admitted her errors.

I understand the passion, I understand the aims of the work, but it is no excuse to rewrite the history.  As Malthus would often say, two wrongs do not make a right.

So I finished her essay and yeah unfortunately she doesn't really own up to her error. Most she did was say 'some' rather than her original statement that made it appear fear that slavery would go away was driving issue for colonist writ large.

Still I did think raises some interesting points with say use of 'forced labor camp' vs 'plantation'. Also interesting was the portrayal of Lincoln. I was definitely never taught that Frederick Douglass had this to say - where he can complicate our mythologizing of Abraham Lincoln and yet still celebrate him and his accomplishments.

https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/oration-in-memory-of-abraham-lincoln/

Delivered at the Unveiling of The Freedmen's Monument in Lincoln Park, Washington, D.C.

Friends and Fellow-citizens:

I warmly congratulate you upon the highly interesting object which has caused you to assemble in such numbers and spirit as you have today. This occasion is in some respects remarkable. Wise and thoughtful men of our race, who shall come after us, and study the lesson of our history in the United States; who shall survey the long and dreary spaces over which we have traveled; who shall count the links in the great chain of events by which we have reached our present position, will make a note of this occasion; they will think of it and speak of it with a sense of manly pride and complacency.

I congratulate you, also, upon the very favorable circumstances in which we meet today. They are high, inspiring, and uncommon. They lend grace, glory, and significance to the object for which we have met. Nowhere else in this great country, with its uncounted towns and cities, unlimited wealth, and immeasurable territory extending from sea to sea, could conditions be found more favorable to the success of this occasion than here.

We stand today at the national center to perform something like a national act—an act which is to go into history; and we are here where every pulsation of the national heart can be heard, felt, and reciprocated. A thousand wires, fed with thought and winged with lightning, put us in instantaneous communication with the loyal and true men all over the country.

Few facts could better illustrate the vast and wonderful change which has taken place in our condition as a people than the fact of our assembling here for the purpose we have today. Harmless, beautiful, proper, and praiseworthy as this demonstration is, I cannot forget that no such demonstration would have been tolerated here twenty years ago. The spirit of slavery and barbarism, which still lingers to blight and destroy in some dark and distant parts of our country, would have made our assembling here the signal and excuse for opening upon us all the flood-gates of wrath and violence. That we are here in peace today is a compliment and a credit to American civilization, and a prophecy of still greater national enlightenment and progress in the future. I refer to the past not in malice, for this is no day for malice; but simply to place more distinctly in front the gratifying and glorious change which has come both to our white fellow-citizens and ourselves, and to congratulate all upon the contrast between now and then; the new dispensation of freedom with its thousand blessings to both races, and the old dispensation of slavery with its ten thousand evils to both races—white and black. In view, then, of the past, the present, and the future, with the long and dark history of our bondage behind us, and with liberty, progress, and enlightenment before us, I again congratulate you upon this auspicious day and hour.

Friends and fellow-citizens, the story of our presence here is soon and easily told. We are here in the District of Columbia, here in the city of Washington, the most luminous point of American territory; a city recently transformed and made beautiful in its body and in its spirit; we are here in the place where the ablest and best men of the country are sent to devise the policy, enact the laws, and shape the destiny of the Republic; we are here, with the stately pillars and majestic dome of the Capitol of the nation looking down upon us; we are here, with the broad earth freshly adorned with the foliage and flowers of spring for our church, and all races, colors, and conditions of men for our congregation—in a word, we are here to express, as best we may, by appropriate forms and ceremonies, our grateful sense of the vast, high, and preëminent services rendered to ourselves, to our race, to our country, and to the whole world by Abraham Lincoln.

The sentiment that brings us here to-day is one of the noblest that can stir and thrill the human heart. It has crowned and made glorious the high places of all civilized nations with the grandest and most enduring works of art, designed to illustrate the characters and perpetuate the memories of great public men. It is the sentiment which from year to year adorns with fragrant and beautiful flowers the graves of our loyal, brave, and patriotic soldiers who fell in defence [sic] of the Union and liberty. It is the sentiment of gratitude and appreciation, which often, in the presence of many who hear me, has filled yonder heights of Arlington with the eloquence of eulogy and the sublime enthusiasm of poetry and song; a sentiment which can never die while the Republic lives.

For the first time in the history of our people, and in the history of the whole American people, we join in this high worship, and march conspicuously in the line of this time-honored custom. First things are always interesting, and this is one of our first things. It is the first time that, in this form and manner, we have sought to do honor to an American great man, however deserving and illustrious. I commend the fact to notice; let it be told in every part of the Republic; let men of all parties and opinions hear it; let those who despise us, not less than those who respect us, know that now and here, in the spirit of liberty, loyalty, and gratitude, let it be known everywhere, and by everybody who takes an interest in human progress and in the amelioration of the condition of mankind, that, in the presence and with the approval of the members of the American House of Representatives, reflecting the general sentiment of the country; that in the presence of that august body, the American Senate, representing the highest intelligence and the calmest judgment of the country; in the presence of the Supreme Court and Chief-Justice of the United States, to whose decisions we all patriotically bow; in the presence and under the steady eye of the honored and trusted President of the United States, with the members of his wise and patriotic Cabinet, we, the colored people, newly emancipated and rejoicing in our blood-bought freedom, near the close of the first century in the life of this Republic, have now and here unveiled, set apart, and dedicated a monument of enduring granite and bronze, in every line, feature, and figure of which the men of this generation may read, and those of after-coming generations may read, something of the exalted character and great works of Abraham Lincoln, the first martyr President of the United States.

Fellow-citizens, in what we have said and done today, and in what we may say and do hereafter, we disclaim everything like arrogance and assumption. We claim for ourselves no superior devotion to the character, history, and memory of the illustrious name whose monument we have here dedicated today. We fully comprehend the relation of Abraham Lincoln both to ourselves and to the white people of the United States. Truth is proper and beautiful at all times and in all places, and it is never more proper and beautiful in any case than when speaking of a great public man whose example is likely to be commended for honor and imitation long after his departure to the solemn shades, the silent continents of eternity. It must be admitted, truth compels me to admit, even here in the presence of the monument we have erected to his memory, Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man.

He was preëminently the white man's President, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men. He was ready and willing at any time during the first years of his administration to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people to promote the welfare of the white people of this country. In all his education and feeling he was an American of the Americans. He came into the Presidential chair upon one principle alone, namely, opposition to the extension of slavery. His arguments in furtherance of this policy had their motive and mainspring in his patriotic devotion to the interests of his own race. To protect, defend, and perpetuate slavery in the states where it existed Abraham Lincoln was not less ready than any other President to draw the sword of the nation. He was ready to execute all the supposed guarantees of the United States Constitution in favor of the slave system anywhere inside the slave states. He was willing to pursue, recapture, and send back the fugitive slave to his master, and to suppress a slave rising for liberty, though his guilty master were already in arms against the Government. The race to which we belong were not the special objects of his consideration. Knowing this, I concede to you, my white fellow-citizens, a preëminence in this worship at once full and supreme. First, midst, and last, you and yours were the objects of his deepest affection and his most earnest solicitude. You are the children of Abraham Lincoln. We are at best only his step-children; children by adoption, children by forces of circumstances and necessity. To you it especially belongs to sound his praises, to preserve and perpetuate his memory, to multiply his statues, to hang his pictures high upon your walls, and commend his example, for to you he was a great and glorious friend and benefactor. Instead of supplanting you at his altar, we would exhort you to build high his monuments; let them be of the most costly material, of the most cunning workmanship; let their forms be symmetrical, beautiful, and perfect; let their bases be upon solid rocks, and their summits lean against the unchanging blue, overhanging sky, and let them endure forever! But while in the abundance of your wealth, and in the fullness of your just and patriotic devotion, you do all this, we entreat you to despise not the humble offering we this day unveil to view; for while Abraham Lincoln saved for you a country, he delivered us from a bondage, according to Jefferson, one hour of which was worse than ages of the oppression your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose.

Fellow-citizens, ours is no new-born zeal and devotion—merely a thing of this moment. The name of Abraham Lincoln was near and dear to our hearts in the darkest and most perilous hours of the Republic. We were no more ashamed of him when shrouded in clouds of darkness, of doubt, and defeat than when we saw him crowned with victory, honor, and glory. Our faith in him was often taxed and strained to the uttermost, but it never failed. When he tarried long in the mountain; when he strangely told us that we were the cause of the war; when he still more strangely told us that we were to leave the land in which we were born; when he refused to employ our arms in defence [sic] of the Union; when, after accepting our services as colored soldiers, he refused to retaliate our murder and torture as colored prisoners; when he told us he would save the Union if he could with slavery; when he revoked the Proclamation of Emancipation of General Fremont; when he refused to remove the popular commander of the Army of the Potomac, in the days of its inaction and defeat, who was more zealous in his efforts to protect slavery than to suppress rebellion; when we saw all this, and more, we were at times grieved, stunned, and greatly bewildered; but our hearts believed while they ached and bled. Nor was this, even at that time, a blind and unreasoning superstition. Despite the mist and haze that surrounded him; despite the tumult, the hurry, and confusion of the hour, we were able to take a comprehensive view of Abraham Lincoln, and to make reasonable allowance for the circumstances of his position. We saw him, measured him, and estimated him; not by stray utterances to injudicious and tedious delegations, who often tried his patience; not by isolated facts torn from their connection; not by any partial and imperfect glimpses, caught at inopportune moments; but by a broad survey, in the light of the stern logic of great events, and in view of that divinity which shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will, we came to the conclusion that the hour and the man of our redemption had somehow met in the person of Abraham Lincoln. It mattered little to us what language he might employ on special occasions; it mattered little to us, when we fully knew him, whether he was swift or slow in his movements; it was enough for us that Abraham Lincoln was at the head of a great movement, and was in living and earnest sympathy with that movement, which, in the nature of things, must go on until slavery should be utterly and forever abolished in the United States.

...

[Sheilbh]

Posting this here as probably makes more sense there than in the Britain thread ().

I found this graph interesting as it appears to highlight the importance of intersectionality:

Yeah and to add the compulsory British angle I suspect there'd be similar differences if you looked at it from a class perspective (especially over a longer period).

Working class women were very often workers too - even after marriage and once they'd become mothers. It may have been different types of work - more fragmented, casual, less secure - which I think, to the 70s conversation, is one of the reasons unions failed to organise.

[HVC]

Very interesting speech by Frederick Douglass.

Also, does that chart include single parent households in the bread winner category?

*edit* that's not to say that the prevalence of single parent homes isn't an important matter to consider, just that I think it's a different topic.

[garbon]

Very interesting speech by Frederick Douglass.

I definitely would have found repeated years of American history more interesting in school if they could have provided us a more complex picture.

Also, does that chart include single parent households in the bread winner category?

*edit* that's not to say that the prevalence of single parent homes isn't an important matter to consider, just that I think it's a different topic.

So it is from here:
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/breadwinning-mothers-are-increasingly-the-u-s-norm/

Bit of text near it says:

Black mothers are by far the most likely to be the primary economic support for their families, both because they are more likely to be single mothers and because they are more likely—when part of a married couple—to earn as much as or more than their husbands. The vast majority of black mothers contribute significantly to their families' bottom lines, with only 14.6 percent of black mothers bringing home less than one-quarter of their family's earnings.
...

At least some of the differences in respect to breadwinning rates between different racial and ethnic groups are likely due to the fact that black women and Latinas are more likely than white women to be single mothers.18 Slightly more than half, or 55.8 percent, of white breadwinning mothers are married and earn as much as or more than their husbands.19 However, only 40.4 percent of Latina breadwinning mothers are married, as are only 25.3 percent of black breadwinning mothers. (see Table 1) The majority of black and Latina breadwinning mothers are single parents providing for their families.

Which suggests it is counting single mother households.

This other table suggests that too.

[Oexmelin]

I definitely would have found repeated years of American history more interesting in school if they could have provided us a more complex picture.

There were then, and are now even more, so many barriers between research at university and textbooks in the classroom. The interface between academic history, popular history, mythology (which informs so many parents who push back hard), and state programs was never the best (the AP programmes were an attempt to remedy that) but attempting to paint a more complex picture is basically a sisyphean task.

[viper37]

Also interesting was the portrayal of Lincoln. I was definitely never taught that Frederick Douglass had this to say - where he can complicate our mythologizing of Abraham Lincoln and yet still celebrate him and his accomplishments.

All of this about Abraham Lincoln can be explained once you get out of the myth that the Civil War was fought over slavery, from the North's point of view.  The South fought slavery on which depended their economy and future, the North fought to protect the Union, on which depended their economy and future.

Lincoln engaged in a war to protect the Union.  Everything he did, even abolishing slavery in the end was to protect the Union, in his mind.

Lincoln still believed, before his election, that the Black man was inferior to the White man.  He was but a product of his time.

He said so himself at the beginning of the war that if he could end the war by freeing no slaves, freeing some or freeing them all he would do it.

It is no surprise that Douglass would celebrate his accomplishment, while criticizing the man.

[Sheilbh]

I definitely would have found repeated years of American history more interesting in school if they could have provided us a more complex picture.

At what sort of level and how was it taught?

I don't remember having a "British history" class or learning it chronologically at school here. I was in Scotland and remember a whistlestop tour of Picts, Mary, Queen of Scots, Jacobites, Highland Clearances etc but it was very jumping through time - and basically until 14 (when it becomes optional). Obviously there is an angle in that narrative ().

But for 14-18 it's modular rather than chronological - and the whole point was really about making arguments. That speech I think would have been loved in a course (I didn't do the American Civil War at school) because my memory was that it was all about learning about different sources, thinking about how to balance them (who's writing, when, for what purpose etc) and basically building an argument using sources. So I think two of the most popular modules (I did both at my school) are the origins of the First World War and the rise of the Nazis - in part because there's loads of good primary and secondary sources and there's a live historiographical argument that essay questions will be based on. Is it a similar approach in the US? Because I feel like that speech would be really helpful in that sort of class?

[garbon]

I definitely would have found repeated years of American history more interesting in school if they could have provided us a more complex picture.

There were then, and are now even more, so many barriers between research at university and textbooks in the classroom. The interface between academic history, popular history, mythology (which informs so many parents who push back hard), and state programs was never the best (the AP programmes were an attempt to remedy that) but attempting to paint a more complex picture is basically a sisyphean task.

For certain was not blaming teachers for what they were mandated to teach. Although by my last couple years of high school, we were engaging with texts like the Autobiography of Malcolm X (and having discussions where white classmates said they thought racism was over...) which suggests to me there would have been some leeway to look at myths with a more critical lens had they been so inclined.

[garbon]

I definitely would have found repeated years of American history more interesting in school if they could have provided us a more complex picture.

At what sort of level and how was it taught?

I don't remember having a "British history" class or learning it chronologically at school here. I was in Scotland and remember a whistlestop tour of Picts, Mary, Queen of Scots, Jacobites, Highland Clearances etc but it was very jumping through time - and basically until 14 (when it becomes optional). Obviously there is an angle in that narrative ().

But for 14-18 it's modular rather than chronological - and the whole point was really about making arguments. That speech I think would have been loved in a course (I didn't do the American Civil War at school) because my memory was that it was all about learning about different sources, thinking about how to balance them (who's writing, when, for what purpose etc) and basically building an argument using sources. So I think two of the most popular modules (I did both at my school) are the origins of the First World War and the rise of the Nazis - in part because there's loads of good primary and secondary sources and there's a live historiographical argument that essay questions will be based on. Is it a similar approach in the US? Because I feel like that speech would be really helpful in that sort of class?

So things are hazy at this point, but I feel like until UK equivalent of Year 6 - we mostly did state focused history (so Oregon Trail, Gold Rush, Donner Party, the cozy side of the Mission system in California and Pilgrims, Revolutionary War in MA) over and over again. There was also light dusting of broader American history as I can remember worksheets about Washington/Jefferson/Lincoln and MLK Jr (which I think was always part of Black History month/his recognised birthday) in elementary school.

Then we started expanding more into broader American history and World history but never more modern than WWII. As I mentioned to Oex, by year 12 I was in a class that engaged with more complicated history (plus combined with literature) where there would have been room to look at that Douglass speech.