History - the new Right Wing Target.

The 1619 project was bad optics for the left. I've been hearing about patriotic history ever since.

I'm not discounting your post OP but history has been slowly being altered ever since the TSBOE took over compilation and distribution for many textbooks distributed all over the country. I don't think a lot of kids get good history lesson until they get to college.

I don’t think anyone can dispute that there has been a lot of revisionist history foisted on young people today that differs significantly from the fact based history we all learned as kids.

r3 quite the opposite - what we are taught as kids is the disney version of what really happened.

I dunno about "fact-based" r3. There are always a lot of considerations that go into deciding what facts get mentioned in any history class. Always have been.

White people, especially white conservatives do not like the raw truth of American and world history to be told.

If they hate the 1619 project, than they're going to really hate the new Black history books that are coming out. It's going to be the real none pG-13 version of history told. And it won't show white people or white society in a good light either. Because fact based history doesn't either.

And there's not a damn thing they can do to stop these books from coming out.

Yes. History is under stack by the right. They are upset that things like slavery are being shown in their true perspective. They are upset because their delusion of white supremacy is being shown for what it is. They want their sick Confederate statues. They want their "heritage" to be intact. That is, the lie that the south rose up in some kind of virtuous battle. They don't want their racism exposed. They don't want to be shown as the traitors that they are. They started a treasonous Civil War killing Americans because THEY WANTED SLAVERY. It is all about racism.

The dehumanization of brown people got kicked into high gear with racist Stephen Miller putting people in cages at the boarder. That was just the warm up act. The police responded with their casual killing of black people, but that FINALLY was being caught on camera because everyone has a camera phone. That exploded into BLM and now they are trying to stop the truth about racism in The United States as they are enraged that people of color are standing up for themselves.

Not to put too fine a point on it but, Black Lives Matter.

Well stated R7 and R8.

I don't get the issue with the 1619 project. It just puts history in context along with showing the consequences of certain choices. History is ugly. Do the people against the 1619 project only want feelgood history?

Yes, R1, let's teach children that slaves were mostly happy. It's better optics that way.

R11, the idea is great but some of what it presents is factually inaccurate

r12 I agree!

R1, only according to Republicans

I'm a history teacher and a former professor. The 1619 Project is well-intentioned but not very good history. There are a lot of really great resources for teaching the history of slavery. As far as popular and accessible resources, I don't think you can beat Henry Louis Gates' series.

R3, I worked in textbooks from the 70s to the 90s. Back then what ended up in textbooks nationwide was heavily influenced by politics in a few key states (which were big markets).

The idea that it was "fact-based" is laughable. I will say that it was getting better when I left the industry. And I would say that while the 1619 Project is not elegant, it is solidly fact based on what the most reliable historians have been reporting for the last few decades.

It is not perfect, but it is a step in the right direction.

Thank your for that analysis R17. I've been curious about the backlash against The 1619 Project.

What kind of history do you think they teach at Liberty University? Have you ever seen the tests from these Christain schools? I saw one posted on Facebook. It was true false and one of the questions was Dinosaurs and Jesus existed at the same time and True was the correct answer....fucking scary.

[quote] The 1619 project was bad optics for the left.

That clown hair is helping either.

Public schools here aren't very good and the locals don't seem to care. They're seem concerned about having a free babysitter to get the junior demons out of the house everyday. The charter schools are closer to the school's we grew up in 30 plus years ago and they do a good job with higher income (dumb), kids who can afford to pay a premium price and the smart poor kids who get scholarships because the get the test scores up. History is so whitewashed that it shouldn't be taught at all. It should be math and science and nothing more.

Kids don’t know the basic facts of American history, like early European exploration, the Revolution, the Constitutional Convention, the settling of the west, the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Gilded Age, who the presidents were, etc. Most can’t say when the War of 1812 was.

I would be happy if they learned about the Iroquois League and its influence on the structure of our government. Part of the myth is that Europeans came here and were unaffected by the people already living here.

The way history is taught kids learn almost nothing about anything in which Europeans were not involved. Maybe some fact-based learning, in which they learn about the governments that were in place before the Europeans arrived and how those governments fell would be relevant to our world today.

^^^I mean fact-based as opposed to politically slanted to marginalize any events or entities in which Europeans were not involved.

I don't remember any history on the slaughtering of the indigenous people of the US growing up. All we ever got was a glossy white bread version of how great the white settlers were shaping america. I think Slavery was a chapter and it was made to sound like the white man saved the black people.

[quote] And I would say that while the 1619 Project is not elegant, it is solidly fact based on what the most reliable historians have been reporting for the last few decades.

Except it isn’t and even Jones has had to walk it back after numerous historians— from the left, center, and right— disputed her claims and provided actual facts to prove their arguments.

To say nothing of her prejudice against Native Americans and refusal to even address their complex history.

It's part of the whole Trump plan to "fix" history in the schools by making it "patriotic."

As we just learned this morning, the CIA knows Putin and Russia are manipulating Trump and the GOP and using internet trolls and other tactics to sway opinion. It's likely a lot of the people you've seen complaining about history lately are trolls... but the problem is real Americans, the Trumpster and QAnon types, will start saying the same thing the trolls are saying, just to support their dear leader.

And of course far-right fundies have been saying this about history and schools for decades, claiming that school history is a lie and Biblical history is the only truth.

[quote]I think Slavery was a chapter

Only if the period 1790 - 1865 was a chapter, since you can’t discuss the invention of the cotton gin, the Compromise of 1820, Texas annexation, the Mexican War, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott decision, the Fugitive Slave Act, John Brown’s Raid, etc. without discussion of slavery. A valid American history course is going to spend a lot of time on the years from the Constitutional Convention to the Civil War.

GenXer here. This is what I remember about history class and I'm gonna break it out by chapters:

Chapter 1) Founding of America/Colonial Period/Revolutionary War

Chapter 2) Slavery, The Civil War (which I remember my teacher having a problem with and referring to it as The War Between the States), and Reconstruction

Chapter 3) The Great Depression

Chapter 4) WW2

We really didn't get anything of major substance in American History about WW1, The Korean War or Vietnam. But those of us in the gifted program got a semester of World History that focused on those events, but the other kids didn't get that.

And I get it, there is only so much time you can devote to everything, so you can't do a deep dive on all of our history AND I also understand that history is usually written by the winners so that plays a part in it.

If you're a black kid, this is what you learn: We were slaves, then we were free, then Jim Crow happened and things got bad again. Except for a few mentions in February, you would think that black people had very little input building this nation.

If you're Native American you get the Pilgrims and Thanksgiving and Pocahontas.

I understand that white people don't want to always be the villains of the story. But there has to be a way to teach history honestly and fairly, that gives of complete picture of who we are and how we got to where we are. Or just honestly say, "to make an omelet, you gotta break some eggs. They fucked up, we fuck up, and we will continue fuck up. That's what the whole 'more perfect union' part means."

A couple of years ago I ordered some A Beka textbooks from eBay, because I was curious about what the right wing was teaching their children in homeschool. It was jaw-dropping how severely biased everything was done, even basic Science. I remember something about 'you can't see electricity, but we know it's there. That's how we know that Jesus exists'. I was so appalled that I threw the books into a dumpster, they weren't worth having around even for shits and giggles.

African Americans sit very prominently although out American history. They've been in north America since 1526, that's 494 years and just 6 years shy of 509 years. That's a lot of history white society is trying to suppress.

Thank god for African American studies in the universities across the country. You get the real raw unadulterated truth in those classes, nothing is sugarcoated.

I meant 6year shybof 500.

Typo.

More typos at R32.

The Times has quietly revised a key claim of the 1619 Project, that the year 1619 represents America's "true founding" (and no, I am not "right wing" -- just drawing this to your attention:

The initial introduction to the Project, when it was rolled out in August 2019, stated that

[quote]The 1619 Project is a major initiative from the New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.

The revised text now reads:

[quote]The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.

A similar change was made from the print version of the 1619 Project, which has been sent out to millions of school children in all 50 states. The original version read:

[quote]In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the British colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. America was not yet America, but this was the moment it began. No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the 250 years of slavery that followed.

The website version has deleted the key claim. It now reads:

[quote]In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the English colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the years of slavery that followed.

Not just American history but history in general. White people are all over it. Asians, Latins, Africans, not so much.

Not just American history but history in general. White people are all over it. Asians, Latins, Africans, not so much.

What do you mean r35/r36?

Most people are woefully ill-informed about basic facts of history. They could not tell you with any degree of accuracy when important events occurred, including the American Revolution and the Civil War. Without knowing what occurred, when it occurred, and who was involved, all that you are left with is a disorderly jumble of disparate facts that lack any context to organize and evaluate them. People can dismiss all of this as “a bunch of boring stuff done by dead people,” but they fail to appreciate that decisions made decades and centuries ago animate and influence where we are today. For example, we are still living with the failures of Reconstruction in the same way that Americans in the latter half of the 19th century lived with the failures of the Founders to deal with slavery.

And, yes, much of what has been taught has been whitewashed to soften the harsh realities of our brutal past. But, adding more facts — a great goal — without having the larger historical framework in which to evaluate them seems to fall short of what is needed.

the attack on history started long ago. Did you know that a majority of Americans never belonged to any church until the twentieth century?

In Texas in 1860 for example, only 11% of people belonged to a church.

What made the US into a "Christian Nation" was WHITE southerners using church as a political organizing tool for white supremacy

..but only after the Civil War you see. Before they didn't need to.

Source please, r39/r40

And "belonging to a church" is kind of meaningless. How many Texans lived in rural areas in 1860? Maybe churches weren't widely accessible and they practiced religion at the homes of neighbors or something.

Many of the founding fathers were deists. Also, the under God part of the pledge of allegiance was added in 1954.

The founding fathers were members of the elite, r44. They were hardly rank-and-file inhabitants of the colonies.

They were only "deists" in the sense that in colonial times you had to be a church member to be eligible for public office but to get elected you had to appeal to the unchurched majority. Hence: deism was not a philosophy to Americans, but a little fraud where people who didn't give a shit about religion pretended to believe in God.

r37 I mean most of the history taught in American schools is white focused and whitewashed. I never learned about Japanese internment camps in WW2 in the US where we took our own citizens and put them in camps simply because they were Japanese (and other Asian races) Or that the we practically enslaved Chinese people to build the US railways. No mention of the slaughter of the native people or giving them blankets with infectious diseases to wipe them out. I remember in high school we had to watch and write a paper on Gone with the Wind...as if that was factual.

I mean, the 1619 Project is emblematic of the most common take on American history these days. Some call it Marxist, but I think it's more "Wow, I learned something that doesn't comport with the story American mythology tells of itself: such a discovery!" and it's buttressed with "education needs to tell the whole story, not sanitized BS."

As if we didn't already know. In any contemporary account of American history, high up there are the stories of indigenous people, slaves, women, and other oppressed groups. Which is fine, but it can get tiresome. And it's increasingly being used as a lever to push "structural change" which the plurality do not want (e.g., reparations) and which spur on reactionary forces.

R47, how old are you, and where did you go to school? Jesus. That stuff is the main thrust of high school American history classes in mainstream metropolitan schools.

r49 I am 12

R47 is like 70 and lives in Mississippi.

R34, the revisions keep the main thrust while eliminating the hot button issues. That is pretty much how any educational initiative revises itself.

[quote] In any contemporary account of American history, high up there are the stories of indigenous people, slaves, women, and other oppressed groups.

History class should definitely be truthful by explicitly pointing that for many years in this country women and PoC were not allowed to become important and they were held back from having great achievements that might have had a huge impact. Instead of that honest admission of our negative past, history promotes minor female and PoC from that era and demotes the monumental white men to create a history that never was but one that people wish had been.

Slavery was very much bound up with the creation of capitalism. Cash crops, mercantile trade, insurance, banking, shipbuilding, letters of credit, mining for precious metals: all of it grew with the slave trade, which was certainly more important than steam textile mills to the rise of capitalism.

Part of the problem is that 50 years of false propaganda has dumbass brainless Americans thinking capitalism=free markets. It never has, but then free markets never made any society rich unless it had a monopoly of some resource. No "capitalism" is socialized currency, credit, and enterprise risk. It started in the seventeenth century in England with government innovations in law. It is a superstructure that was put on society in order to fund national wars and thieving monarchs, and it worked surprisingly well through legal tender, corporations, securities markets, and banking. None of it was ever generated spontaneously by a market, any market.

All of it was generated by government and especially by limiting the risks actors in the economy face, meaning government was stuck carrying the consequences of that risk.

And ultimately the people who pay for the government. So the idea that capitalists should not be regulated in the public interest amounts to an idiocy that shows people don't understand what capitalism is or how it works or why it creates wealth.

Most enslaved people were happy with their lives! Evolution is a farce! Jesus rode on dinosaurs! If we stopped gay rights, there wouldn't have been any AIDS! I eat paste!

Liberal grizzly bears have been indoctrinating our nation's children!

I’m not taking up for the Deplorables, but I have kids in the NYC public school system and they spend a lot of time on various woke bullshit. I didn’t realize how much until I had three of them “remote learning”. It’s especially noticeable in the high schools. I toured one where they had a restorative Justice circle and people had to snap their fingers in agreement and there were some people raising their hands skyward and mmm-hmm-ing. It was fucking bizarre. That school got crossed off the list.

R20

[quote] That clown hair is helping either.

Oh, dear...

Same thing the trans cult is doing with gay history (see: Stonewall).

[post redacted because linking to dailymail.co.uk clearly indicates that the poster is either a troll or an idiot (probably both, honestly.) Our advice is that you just ignore this poster but whatever you do, don't click on any link to this putrid rag.]

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Most Americans learned of the Tulsa Black Wall Street massacre by seeing The Watchmen.

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