The Texas Board of Education's conservative members are going on the deep end. As the one of the largest buyers of textbooks in the country, the board wants to change and re-write the history books. Smaller states who have no textbook buying power would essentially have to read and study the new Texas version of history.

The changes are ideological and distort history, but conservative Board of Education argue they are correcting a long-standing liberal bias in education. Read the running history of this very interesting "culture war" here and if you want details, read the exact changes here.

One of the most controversial changes is to deny the slave trade. The Texas Board of Education wants to refer to the slave trade as the "Atlantic triangular trade". What the he** is the "Atlantic triangular trade"? What do you call the millions of African-Americans whose ancestors came here as slaves? Descendants of triangulates?

Say what?...

Michael Schack - 6/16/2010

I have a feeling they did not read this bookThe Slave Ship" by Marcus Rediker,

Arnold Shcherban - 5/20/2010

Of course, it was "about more" than just slavery (such a mean and incomplete term...), it was also about super-greed and perceived racial superiority of Anglo-Saxon race.
What a whitewash! (pun on words is intended.)
Same (insane) good, ol' story...
It looks like nothing changed under the puritan racist sun in the course of the last two centuries.

S. K. - 5/20/2010

The "Triangular Trade" is exactly what it's been called for years and years and accurately represents the pattern of trade in Colonial America. That's how I learned about it 30 years ago and quite frankly I'm surprised to learn that they now teach it as "slave trade." For students to understand the economics and dynamics that created and sustained the trade, they must understand the big picture - all parts. Now, if Texas wanted to rename it the "Rum" trade or the "tobacco" trade and exclude the role of slavery in the trading economics, then you might have valid disagreement. But let's not go overboard because Texas desires to return to the original name of the practice and make sure all students at every level understand the complexity of the times. We don't want to dumb down our students. We want them to understand that it was all about more than "just" slaves.

You'll have to find something else to pick on.