1776 commission 
-
SOURCE: The New Yorker
10/31/2022
Is Moms For Liberty Out to Protect Kids or Scare Parents?
Williamson County in suburban Nashville shows how the astroturf Mom's group erupted on the scene to challenge a popular and well-regarded social studies curriculum for elementary schools on the grounds that its civil rights lessons were "divisive."
-
SOURCE: Salon
3/15/2022
How a Conservative Christian College is Leading the Fight Against Public Education
by Kathryn Joyce
Hillsdale College is building a national network of conservative education activists with the goals of establishing charter schools based around the school's politically conservative curriculum.
-
SOURCE: Black Perspectives
3/16/2021
On the Mythologizing of United States History
by Matthew Teutsch
"I am a native Louisianian, and I am white. I never learned about the racial violence and voter suppression that occurred during and after Reconstruction, nor did I learn about the massacres that continue to influence the present."
-
SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
3/10/2021
Daryl Michael Scott: ‘Bad History and Worse Social Science Have Replaced Truth’
"If I thought that lies would set you free, maybe I would go along with lies. But I believe that you’re not going to lie your way out of it; you’re going to think your way out of it."
-
SOURCE: New York Daily News
1/20/2021
Making Revisionism Great Again: The Trouble With Trump’s Rewriting Of American History
by James W. Loewen
The 1776 commission quotes Frederick Douglass for its own peculiar purposes, so I shall end by quoting him for mine. “He is a lover of his country who rebukes and does not excuse its sins.”
-
SOURCE: Atlanta Journal-Constitution
2/21/2021
Every Curriculum is Ideological
by Peter Smagorinsky
"Every curriculum is ideological. And simply through its selection of materials, subjects, and perspectives, every curriculum is doctrinaire. If conservative thought is designed to promote stability, then it also supports the perpetuation of existing inequities. That sounds political and ideological to me."
-
SOURCE: Quad City Times
2/14/2021
Editorial: Leave History to the Historians
An Iowa editorial board says that the flaws of the 1619 Project are nothing in comparison to the efforts of state legislators to interfere in the content of history education.
-
SOURCE: Washington Post
2/2/2021
Trump’s 1776 Commission and the San Francisco Board of Education Have a Lot in Common
by Max Boot
"It is no surprise that the 1776 Commission did not include a single expert on U.S. history and that the San Francisco school board also refused to consult historians."
-
SOURCE: Washington Post
1/28/2021
Serious Historians are Criticizing Trump’s 1776 Report. It’s How Most U.S. History is Already Taught
by Matthew Nelsen
Political scientist Matthew Nelsen argues that the proponents of the 1776 Commission's "patriotic" history are defending an outdated curriculum against well-founded challenges, not protecting real history from trendy cultural politics.
-
SOURCE: New York Times
2/1/2021
The 1776 Follies
by Michael Kazin
"At its core, the 1776 report reveals a profound ignorance about what professional historians of the United States actually think and do."
-
1/31/2021
The 1776 Presidential Commissioners Forgot That Dissent is as American as Hero Worship
by David Wippman and Glenn C. Altschuler
After insisting that educators avoid “political agendas,” the 1776 Commission Report authors simply assume that their simplistic hero-worship version of history is “accurate, honest, unifying, inspiring, and ennobling.”
-
SOURCE: Blue Book Diaries
1/23/2021
“Many Students Are Now Taught in School to Hate Their Own Country”
by Jonathan Wilson
The biggest problem with the "1776 Commission" report is its broad and unfounded assumptions about how students actually respond to history classes. The report never asks if students might love America more because it has moved on from the 18th century, because its purpose is ideological grievance, not effective teaching.
-
SOURCE: The Bulwark
1/22/2021
The Origins of Trump’s Slapdash, Last-Second ‘1776 Report’
by Joshua Tait
Putting the "1776 Commission" report into context requires understanding that it's not just a "conservative" project, but a product of a movement to define the United States as the realization of classical and Biblical civilization imperiled by relativism and multiculturalism.
-
SOURCE: The New Republic
1/25/2021
Against the Consensus Approach to History
by William Hogeland
Current debates about the historiography of slavery and the founding mistake the authority claimed by past generations of historians for scholarly integrity instead of recognizing that writing history has always been a political act (that often works to conceal its politics).
-
SOURCE: Jacobin
1/19/2021
The Sheer Absurdity of Trump’s “1776 Commission” Report Is Hard to Overstate
by Timothy Messer-Kruse
"If American education was organized according to its blueprint it would look strikingly like the schoolrooms common in 1776, complete with rulers used primarily to rap the knuckles of students who answered their questions the wrong way."
-
SOURCE: New York Daily News
1/20/2021
Making Revisionism Great Again: The Trouble with Trump’s Rewriting of American History
by James Loewen
"We already have the education that the commission recommends. Our textbooks are nationalist and ethnocentric, rather than critical. That’s why we’re in trouble."
-
SOURCE: Associated Press
1/21/2021
Biden Revokes Trump Report Promoting "Patriotic Education"
"In documents announcing Biden’s executive order, administration officials said the panel sought to erase America’s history of racial injustice'."
-
SOURCE: American Historical Association
1/20/2021
AHA Condemns Report of Advisory 1776 Commission
“Written hastily in one month after two desultory and tendentious ‘hearings,’” the AHA writes, “without any consultation with professional historians of the United States, the report fails to engage a rich and vibrant body of scholarship that has evolved over the last seven decades."
-
SOURCE: Inside Higher Ed
1/20/2021
A Push for ‘Patriotic Education’
David Blight and Lindsay Stallones Marshall argue that the report's purpose is purely political and will result in further degradation of the public capacity to judge facts and evidence.
-
SOURCE: New York Times
1/19/2021
The Ideas Behind Trump’s 1776 Commission Report
Nicole Hemmer, David Blight, Geoffrey Kabaservice, and Adam Laats place the 1776 Commission report in the context of longstanding political and cultural battles over historical narrative.
News
- How Tina Turner Escaped Abuse and Reclaimed her Name
- The Biden Administration Wants to Undo the Damage of Urban Highways. It Won't be Simple
- AAUP: Fight Tooth and Nail Against Florida's Higher Ed Agenda Because Your State is Next
- Texas GOP's Ten Commandments School Bill Fails
- Former Alabama Governors: We Regret Overseeing Executions
- Jeff Sharlet on the Intersectional Erotics of Fascism
- Scholars Stage Teach-in on Racism in DeSantis's Back Yard
- Paul Watanabe, Historian and Manzanar Survivor, Makes Sure History Isn't Forgotten
- Massachusetts-Based Historians: Book Bans in Florida Affect Us, Too
- Deborah Lipstadt's Work Abroad as Antisemitism Envoy Complicated by Definitional Dispute