Timelines: The Contested Teaching of American History
The teaching of American history is not, and has never been, a politically neutral endeavor. As the historian and educator Howard Zinn asserted about his teaching: “[I could not] pretend to an objectivity that was neither possible nor desirable. ‘You can’t be neutral on a moving train,’ I would tell [my students] … ‘Events are already moving in certain deadly directions, and to be neutral means to accept that.’”
For hundreds of years, the teaching of U.S. history has been a battleground for conflicting political perspectives and ideologies. That is especially true today, as the Right wages a so-called “war on woke” that attempts to dismantle efforts to teach histories of identity, oppression, and resistance in the context of race, gender, sexuality, and more.
At the beginning of the course “American Historiography,” Division 3 (9th/10th grade) students worked in a small groups to research and create interactive timelines about a contemporary area in which the teaching of American history is contested: Critical Race Theory, the 1619 Project, and AP African-American Studies.