I don’t know what history books y’all read but the one I got wasn’t shy about the shit we’ve got on our heads, even if some previously lesser known atrocities weren’t part of the material
To be fair, I hear US history education varies wildly by state. Thanks states rights!
So, there’s a chance to meet someone from another state that may really have been taught a different history at school. How different depends on the state’s political majority?
What state portrays US history as utopian in the past 20 years? I grew up in Kentucky and definitely got a lot of stuff about slavery, Native American betrayals and murders, civil rights, Mexican American war, Hawaiian colonization, the only reason they didn’t cover the Vietnam war or Filipino is because they ran out of time from assigning pointless art projects.
Edit: Other stuff that was covered, bonus army, workers rights and child abuses
My schools and textbooks weren’t shy about the acts of evil that were committed, but somehow found ways to speak highly of those involved in said acts
Because people can do good things and horrible things in their life. Essentially no one is universally evil in everything they do.
I agree with that 100%! I still think it’s weird that we national holidays to celebrate slave owners, regardless of what good things they did that have no relation to their owning of slaves.
If it ain’t a retelling that it’s all shit a la Howard Zinn it really tends to be rose colored glasses trying to explain how the true nationalistic spirit of freedom loving America always strives to win out in the end. But it’s really a rotten foundation leading to a rotten house.
https://libcom.org/article/peoples-history-united-states-howard-zinn-0
Zinn still begins his book by complaining about Stalin, who, last time I checked, never set foot in the United States. A People’s History is still a liberal text, one that insists that the USA is flawed but good. We read it in my APUSH class, and even today the teacher is a hardcore Biden supporter who thinks that communism is evil and that workers should allow capitalists to drain their blood. People who are actually interested in american history should read Gerald Horne.
