U.S. History College Class

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Yes, I agree that textbooks are notoriously biased and, at other times, just plain inaccurate. I tell my students not to believe everything they read in their textbook and never to use a textbook as a reference in a research paper except perhaps when there is a main editor and specific authors for each topic.

BCE and CE, as you state, are not a problem.

Share some cake!
 
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ltwin said:
Chapter 21, section called “Resurrection of the Ku Klux Klan”
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What’s on my screen shows the following in Chapter 21:

Postwar Turmoil

People of Plenty

Challenges to Social Conventions

Culture Wars

Politics and the Fading of Prosperity

Conclusion: The Roaring Twenties

There’s no section for the KKK (although there may be a subsection

And I note you say there’s “Resurrection of the Ku Klux Klan” Is there no section on the ORIGIN of the KKK? Is there any mention of how Pete Longstreet, Robert E. Lee’s right hand man after Jackson put down the KKK in Louisiana?
 
Londoner said:
You seem to think that US history is being censored to avoid any criticism of the Democratic Party. To the best of my knowledge that is not happening.
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Yeah. There is a bias against Republicans when it comes to recent US history in American academia. There is a sense that the Democrats are the “nice party” and the Republicans are the “mean party.” There is almost an attitude that in the 1960s all the racists left the Democrats and switched to Republican or something (Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” is highlighted).

However, concerning history history, I think academia does ok with recognizing the Democratic Party’s historical failures when it comes to racial issues.
 
vern_humphrey said:
And I note you say there’s “Resurrection of the Ku Klux Klan” Is there no section on the ORIGIN of the KKK? Is there any mention of how Pete Longstreet, Robert E. Lee’s right hand man after Jackson put down the KKK in Louisiana?
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Perhaps, if you are this curious about what is in the textbook you should buy a used copy off of Amazon or Ebay and read it for yourself.
 
Happy to have some cake. It’s Mother Mary’s birthday today, and since she was Jewish, I’m sure you won’t mind if I eat the cake in her honor. 🙂
 
Yes, I think you are right about there being some biased opinions about the Republican Party as things stand today. I have a friend who does some teaching for Harvard and she told me that when Donald Trump was elected she received a briefing on the particular challenges of teaching Republican students! So, yes, I can completely see that there are some unfair prejudices about the two main US political parties today.

What @vern_humphrey was alleging was that the history of the 19th and early 20th centuries has been rewritten to deny that the Democratic Party formerly supported slavery and Jim Crow. As I think you rightly say, nobody is actually doing this. The history of US party politics in the 19th and early 20th centuries is appears to be represented fairly and accurately by serious historians.
 
I’m studying a course which explains the devastating consequences of colonization in Americas. There were, perhaps other ways to evangelize the Aboriginal peoples of North America. Their traditional beliefs are not really related to religion but mostly conveyed in songs, story-telling of how their fathers lived, etc., and mostly in art.

The Mikmaw people of Canada are largely Roman Catholic. They practice the faith while keeping their traditions. They choose to keep the faith, while some believe in other religions.

The thing is, the approach to evangelization was largely different. Rather than inviting the children to church, the governments rather took children by force from their families and put them in residential schools. They were separated from their mothers and fathers, which might had a horrible effect on their self-esteem. If they were allowed to see their parents, it would have had much better outcomes. Many children caught tuberculosis and died; some children were sexually abused by priests and teachers; some were beaten and abused; some children committed suicide. Those were horrible times for the children, for their families, and for the Indigenous peoples.

Aboriginal youth today suffer from devastating consequences of abuse, abandonment, drug addiction, as this history passes on from generation to generation. Thankfully, TRC is working to establish reconciliation- and also the Catholic priests and bishops are involved as well. We are humans and we make mistakes. After all, priests are also sinners. We all are. TRC is all about recognizing that, the parties involved in the abuse were also sinners, and it’s time to say “This is not the right way to allow others to become Catholic, and we apologize.”

We just have to make sure that things are not going to happen by force and the pain of those who don’t deserve it. There must be other ways to evangelize than tearing families apart and leading to deaths of thousands of indigenous peoples worldwide.
 
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Please understand that much of the stuff you read about such as removing children from parents, etc. was ultimately economically driven, using evangelization as the morally justified excuse.
Bottom line is that people moving in wanted to use or exploit the land that these people were living on, and indoctrinating the children into the culture of the invaders, perhaps using the excuse that they needed to learn about God, is one way to effectively remove the “problem” of indigenous people getting in the way of whatever economic plan the people moving in have in mind.
 
I have a history degree earned in 1992. While I agree with DIERM that history doesn’t change, the way it is taught certainly does change. The way I was taught in school about Christopher Columbus in the 1970’s is vastly different from they way my daughter was taught in the late 00’s.

I find the study of history to be quite fascinating and truly enjoyed my studies. I also have enjoyed continuing them on my own. And, my daughter is now a history major who will be teaching secondary education next year (we hope), so it’s very interesting to discuss topics with her to see how she’s learning about them.
 
The thing is, while revisionist history doesn’t exist per se, there are many people who distort and falsely present history to make it say whatever they want (which often doesn’t coincide with the truth, usually by over-simplifying matters, and amplifying/focusing on the parts that make their case, while entirely avoiding anything that would harm their arguments (such as the argument that “Christianity caused the fall of Rome”.
 
Londoner said:
I have two degrees in history and never found a course to be one sided.
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My degree is B.S. Ed. Social Studies with a concentration in History. When I took Women’s History in college, the professor was ardently feminist. We had an ongoing verbal repartee in class, and the only other person who defended me was (at that time) an atheist. I barely passed that course.

And don’t forget the dictum of Napoleon Bonaparte that history is written by the victors. 😉
 
vern_humphrey said:
Are you saying students are taught it was the Democrats that supported slavery, ant the Republicans who opposed it? Do they teach that Segregation was enacted in “Yellow Dog” Democrat states? Do they talk about the KKK as the enforcement wing of the Democrat Party? Do they identify Bull Connors, Orvil Faubus and other segregationists as Democrats?
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I am a History major myself and none of these things were hidden. For example, I remember reading in a US History Class Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War by Eric Foner (no one would confuse him for being a conservative) and it is, from what I remember, an extremely well written book that is one of the best histories of that era. It is an extensive look at the early Republican Party, it’s anti-slavery roots and the different factions that made up the party. I highly recommend it to any US History student learning 19th century history.
 
Londoner said:
What @vern_humphrey was alleging was that the history of the 19th and early 20th centuries has been rewritten to deny that the Democratic Party formerly supported slavery and Jim Crow. As I think you rightly say, nobody is actually doing this. The history of US party politics in the 19th and early 20th centuries is appears to be represented fairly and accurately by serious historians.
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Yes, as a fellow history major I must agree with this.
 
Yes, of course…you are speaking of historiography, which as I had stated is only one element of History…While historiography is “revised” History is not because events and chronology cannot be changed.

And, as far as historiography being distorted or false, its a matter of prospective, not far from the old adage, “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”.
 
Yes. If a plan was perhaps managed a different way, we could have prevented the children who hopelessly committed suicide. The Aboriginal youth now commits suicide 30% more than other people in Canada now. When I go back, I might participate with the Aboriginal committee in Catholic dioceses to share my stories in a reserve I volunteered in.

I’ve also worked in evangelization efforts in a really beautiful reserve in Alberta. I told them that I was a Christian, and I told them that God loved them. We spent hours talking about how my ancestors were taken from practicing our faith (I was a Protestant at that time, and I was well-aware that Protestants and Catholics were murdered together because they were both Christians). I don’t think I was there to spread the Protestant faith, but just to proclaim that God loved them. As a descendant of Catholic converts who were murdered for their faith in colonization, I just have a part of myself to resonate with them. (Also I learned a bit of Cree and their language is beautiful).

May God have mercy on their peoples.
 
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