teaching history

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• 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."

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• 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'."

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• 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."

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• 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. 

• 
• SOURCE: MSNBC
  1/20/2021
  

  The Trump Administration's Thinly-Veiled Rebuke of 'The 1619 Project' is a Sloppy, Racist Mess

  by Kevin M. Kruse

  The Commission report selectively quotes from Martin Luther King and ignores massive white resistance to paint a picture of the Civil Rights movement as a national consensus, in order to bash contemporary demands for racial justice. 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Daily News
  1/20/2021
  

  On the Way Out, Trump Trashes History: Why the 1776 Project is so Damaging

  by James Grossman and Jacqueline Jones

  The 1776 Commission report is a propagandistic attack on the role of expertise in government and demands for racial justice, butchering the historical record for the sake of inflaming the deadly resentments that erupted this year against BLM and COVID lockdowns.

• 
• SOURCE: CNN
  1/20/2021
  

  Biden Rescinding the 1776 Commission Doesn't End the Fight over History

  by Nicole Hemmer

  "In dissolving the 1776 Commission on his first day in office, President Biden helped end one source of misinformation about our past, a reminder that, as we work to restore democracy, we will need to restore honest inquiry and accurate history as well."

• 
• SOURCE: The New Republic
  1/20/2021
  

  Opinion: Donald Trump’s Dumb “1776 Project” Is a Perfect End to His Presidency

  "No figure represents the hollowness of American exceptionalism quite like Donald Trump—which only makes it fitting that his presidency is ending with a pathetic and incoherent effort to rage against the death of American exceptionalism."

• 
• SOURCE: HuffPost
  1/15/2021
  

  These Textbooks In Thousands Of K-12 Schools Echo Trump’s Talking Points

  Historian Kathleen Wellman studies two major Christian textbook publishers, whose interpretations of history emphasize moral decline and the need for Christian nationalism and resonate with the themes on display at the Capitol riot. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Metropole
  1/19/2021
  

  Early American Urban Protests — A Review Of Boston’s Massacre

  A review of Eric Hinderaker's new book "Boston's Massacre" highlights the shifting narrative of the events and their place in the national story, and the perpetually unanswered conflict between limits of authority and those of popular protest.

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  1/19/2021
  

  ‘A Hack Job,’ ‘Outright Lies’: Trump Commission’s ‘1776 Report’ Outrages Historians

  by Gillian Brockell

  Washington Post "Retropolis" writer Gillian Brockell has a roundup of remarks by historians on the contents of the 1776 Commission document, featuring Jim Grossman, Eric Rauchway, Ibram X. Kendi, Alexis Coe, Kali Nicole Gross, Kevin M. Kruse, Sean Wilentz, Kevin M. Levin, and Adam Rothman.

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  1/18/2021
  

  Trump’s 1776 Commission Critiques Liberalism in Report Derided by Historians

  James Grossman of the American Historical Association was one of the first of many historians to attack the 1776 Commission document as "cynical politics" and note that not one professional historian of the United States took part in crafting it. 

• 
• SOURCE: Hechinger Report
  1/13/2020
  

  A U.S. History Teacher Scrambles to Explain Unprecedented Attacks and Desecration of Democracy

  by Jim Cullen

  "Our job as educators is to make and model good, conscious choices about what we believe, and to make that necessarily fallible belief system as transparent as we can for students without insisting that they share it."

• 
• SOURCE: Phi Delta Kappan
  1/7/2021
  

  The Silence of the Ellipses: Why History Can’t be about Telling Our Children Lies

  by Sam Wineburg

  The fairly recent elevation of Crispus Attucks as a hero of the American Revolution obscures the complexity of his role in the Boston Massacre and illustrates the pressure for textbooks to conform to a triumphal American narrative rather than engaging with the complexity of the past. 

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• SOURCE: Perspectives on History
  1/11/2021
  

  A Starting Point: Teaching the January 6 Insurrection

  by Kevin Boyle and James Grossman

  "The braided relationship between history and civics will make January 6, 2021, a central concern in classrooms and other educational venues across the country. How can we help our students and others to connect the particulars that played out on our screens to those larger processes?"

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• SOURCE: Perspectives on History
  1/5/2021
  

  Remote Reflections: On Being Present as a Parent and Teacher

  by Quincy T. Mills

  "Midmorning, I take my research files to my son’s oversized desk and work alongside him, which prevents our screens from being barriers. My presence is useful for both of us." Reflections on the interconnections of parenting and research work under COVID.

• 
• SOURCE: NPR
  1/3/2021
  

  How Children's Books Grapple With The Native American Experience

  Host Michel Martin speaks with Aaron Carapella of Tribal Nations Maps about children's books that address the history and experiences of Native Americans.

• 
• SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
  1/3/2021
  

  Column: On His Way Out the Door, Trump Takes Aim Again at ‘Radical’ American History

  Los Angeles Times columinst Nicholas Goldberg says the roster of Trump's 1776 commission does not suggest a serious effort to wrestle with the complexity of American history.