It’s been said that history is written by the victors. If this statement is true, quite frankly, the U.S. History Honors curriculum at Staples scares me, because it means political correctness is a victor.
While other classes, like AP or A-levelU.S., teachU.S.history as a brief overview of the country, looking at it from a variety of perspectives—from colonial to confederate. However, the US Honors curriculum deviates from this path in its focus: the class looks almost exclusively at oppressed groups inAmerica. I wouldn’t say it didn’t teach me anything aboutUShistory that was useful. But I really did feel like we missed a lot.
History has historically been my favorite class, but my experience in U.S. Honors almost turned me off from that. I found examining past events in the context of how they’ve shaped today fascinating.
That’s not what the class did.
To be clear, this was no fault of any teacher. The text for the class was Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, described by “Publishers Weekly” as a “classic of revisionist American history” and a “vital corrective to triumphalist accounts…uncompromising radicalism.” The issue was, simply, that the curriculum had but one idea to hammer home: that there were oppressed people in theseUnited States and that was all there was to talk about.
We learned about the Civil War…exclusively through the view of slave liberation-. We didn’t talk aboutSherman’s march to the sea, which redefined warfare as we know it. We talked about slaves in the north, but the industrialization of the nation that played a tremendous part in both the war and everything about theUSsince wasn’t covered. The Battle of Antietam, the bloodiest single day of fighting in American history, might’ve been mentioned in passing once—and I think that was because someone asked a question about it.
We talked about World War I, too, but only in the context of how it impacted the suffrage movement. We didn’t talk about how it shaped and refined American industry leading into World War II, preparing us to become an industrial superpower.
We learned a lot about women’s struggle for voting rights… but somehow missed the socio-political conditions in theU.S.that developed from World War I and helped lead to the Great Depression.
As a matter of note, we skipped over the Depression. Entirely. Not that it was important or anything.
We managed, in fact, to ignore the better part of World War II except for the Japanese internment camps. Those are far more important than the war effort that stopped fascism and Nazism cold.
If not for outside reading, I’m not sure I’d know we ever invadedKorea, let aloneVietnam, which was mentioned…implicitly, when we talked aboutKentState.
I could go on, pointing out how the word détente was never mentioned or how the lack of coverage of the Cold War at all would leave many at a disadvantage moving into American Government—which, of course, is much easier to understand in contemporary times with outside knowledge of the past 50 years of American history—but that’s not the point. The issue, however, is not that we are covering things we shouldn’t. It’s important to look at oppressed people in theU.S.because that’s an important and often white-washed part of our history. But the solution is not to dedicate an entire class exclusively to it, particularly a graduation requirement calledU.S.history.
According to James D’Amico, the social studies department chair, the U.S. History Honors curriculum was designed “with the underlying assumption that most students who took the course would also take AP U.S. History as juniors or seniors, and would therefore gain the benefit of both approaches to the study of U.S. History.”
At the time, this was a clear justification. U.S. History Honors would prepare students to understand oppressed groups, and a more traditional U.S. History education could come from taking AP US. Today, however, with countless electives being offered to students, this is no longer the case.
The solution to this issue isn’t clear. One option being offered is letting sophomores take AP US, a class with a nationally standardized curriculum that focuses just on the facts.
I like that. But we need to do more.
I will, for one moment, stand with Zinn. As the People’s Historian would say, I write this article not as a prediction, but as a hope.
We can reform our curriculum to reflect the suffering of those oppressed in this country, but also cover the tremendous breadth of American History. Not only would this contextualize future classes, it would prepare us to participate in the American democracy as informed citizens.
