Work

Changing the Subject in the School Wars: An American Historical Association Research Team Perspective

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: What on earth are our school children learning about US history?"At the turn of the 2020s, American pundits posed the question rhetorically-and then proceeded to answer it, without evidence, and in service of partisan tastes.On the one hand were progressive commentators who declared that the typical US history curriculum was a whitewashed fable that suppressed uncomfortable truths about slavery and race. 1 On the other were conservative activists who claimed the opposite-that today's educators, consumed by a hypercritical obsession with race, taught children to hate their country.2 High-profile initiatives like the New York Times Magazine's 1619 Project, President Donald Trump's 1776 Commission, and a wave of state-level prohibitions 1 For commentary and analysis from liberals and progressives, see Valerie Strauss, "It's Back in the Age of ' Alternative Facts': 'Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, '" Washington Post, July 26, 2018; Cory Turner, "Why Schools Fail to Teach Slavery's 'Hard History, '" All Things Considered, National Public Radio, Feb. 4, 2018, https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/ 02/04/582468315/why-schools-fail-to-teach-slaverys-hard-history; Nikita Stewart, "'We Are Committing Educational Malpractice': Why Slavery Is Mistaught-and Worse-in American Schools, " New York Times Magazine, Aug.

Source: History of Education Quarterly

DOI: 10.1017/heq.2025.10

Authors: Nicholas Kryczka, Whitney E. Barringer, Scot McFarlane