Part 4: Curricular Content

Contents

Teachers’ Purposes, Priorities, and Favorites
Native American History
The Founding Era
Westward Expansion
Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction
Industry, Capital, and Labor
The Civil Rights Movement

 

A wide array of forces compete to determine the shape and content of US history curriculum: state legislators, state agency officials, district curriculum specialists, professional associations, educational publishers, and local parents, all while teachers would prefer to be left in charge of the details. Those details—what gets emphasized and what gets minimized—are an expression of those competing forces but with a heavy dose of individual preference.

 

Teachers’ Purposes, Priorities, and Favorites

To discern what teachers thought about the purpose of learning US history, the survey asked them to rate the importance of 20 carefully phrased learning outcomes they might have for their students. Some of these are in essence “skills”; others “goals and values.” Among goals and values, we purposefully included options that signaled various ideological positions, from progressive multicultural to civic nationalist to critical antiracist to centrist optimist to patriotic exceptionalist. This section was designed to reveal what teachers think their students should get from a US history class, in terms of both the narrative arc and core competencies.

These were the prompts and response options provided:

How important are the following skills for US history students to learn in your class?	How important are the following goals and values to teaching US history?
Developing critical thinking skills	Presenting US history as a story of violence, oppression, and/or injustice
Teaching students to analyze primary sources	Presenting US history as a series of conflicts over power
Embedding core knowledge of key events, people, and eras in American history	Presenting US history as a complex mix of accomplishments and setbacks
Teaching students to build arguments using evidence from primary sources	Presenting US history as a consistent fulfillment of the promises of the nation's founding
Teaching students to think in terms of causes and effects	Presenting multiple sides of every story
Teaching students to understand the contingency of historical events	Making connections to the present
Introducing students to historiographical debates	Instilling civic pride in the nation
Getting students to articulate how they feel about the past	Building an appreciation for diversity
Teaching students how to do research	Instilling core knowledge of national heritage
Teaching students how to write a thesis-driven essay	Focusing on challenging/controversial topics
	Developing informed citizens for participation in a democratic society
	Expecting students to confront the role of racism in our nation’s character
	Cultivating an appreciation of the United States as an exceptional nation
	Helping students see the role of God in our nation’s destiny
	Building a shared sense of national identity among students across social groups

 

The data from these questions tell a clear story, with some regional variations (Figs. 30 and 31). Surveyed teachers almost unanimously see the goals of critical thinking (97 percent), democratic citizenship (94 percent), and making connections to the present (93 percent) as central to their approach to teaching US history. Close behind were the goals of teaching cause and effect (87 percent), presenting multiple sides to every story (86 percent), and analyzing primary sources (82 percent). Less popular learning goals included “seeing the role of God in the nation’s destiny” (13 percent), framing US history as “a story of violence, oppression, and/or injustice” (26 percent), or as a “consistent fulfillment of the promises of the nation’s founding” (26 percent).¹

 

 

The specific contours of teacher responses in each state point to distinct cultural and political contexts. Connecticut teachers were more likely than teachers in other states to rate research and writing skills as especially important. In Alabama, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Virginia, more teachers favored core content knowledge than in other states. Alabamans, Texans, and Virginians were more likely to see a value in identifying the United States as an exceptional nation (64 percent within those three states compared with 46 percent in the other six) and to see the role of God in the story (36 percent versus 17 percent in the other states). Fewer teachers in Colorado, Connecticut, and Washington (50 percent) rated civic pride in the nation as an important value as compared with other states (66 percent).²

Though less pronounced than state contrasts, there was some variation in responses according to locale type, with rural and city teachers differing by as much as 10 percentage points regarding how much negative or positive emphasis should be given in US history. Forty-five percent of urban teachers rated “violence, oppression, and/or injustice” as important, as opposed to 35 percent of rural teachers and 34 percent of town teachers. Seventy-one percent of urban teachers agreed that it was important for students to “confront the role of racism in our nation’s character” as compared with 61 percent of rural teachers and 56 percent of town teachers. “Instilling civic pride in the nation” earned approval from 70 percent of rural teachers but only 60 percent of urban teachers. Sixty percent of rural and town teachers saw value in “cultivating an appreciation of the United States as an exceptional nation,” compared with 50 percent of teachers in cities and suburbs. These variations notwithstanding, what is most striking among these data are their general similarity across environments—an index of a common national teaching culture among history educators.³

Focusing more tightly on content, we also asked teachers which topics and eras were top priorities for coverage and which were their favorites to teach. Their answers (Figs. 32 and 33) show clear points of common emphasis: the American Revolution, the Civil War, World War II, and the Civil Rights Movement. This might be read as a playlist of America’s greatest hits: rejecting monarchy, abolishing slavery, fighting Nazis, and ending Jim Crow. But inevitable triumph isn’t the note that teachers strike when they say why they love these topics. Some teachers cite the value of learning about heroes and heroics. But others stress the notion that these events were exciting, dramatic turning points, that they were full of contradictory and complicated politics, and that something about what Americans are today can’t be understood without comprehending these past events.

 

 

This picture doesn’t square with ideological caricatures of politicized classrooms. Teachers (and the resources they use) tend not to align neatly to a partisan “take” on American history. When they succeed, they do so by connecting students with evocative primary sources, promoting patient and empathetic readings of multiple perspectives, and instilling a sense of the contingent and contested nature of historical events.

When curricular materials falter, it’s typically because detail and complexity have been sacrificed in pursuit of streamlining. Sometimes, these simplifications betray an ideological bias, tacking toward moralistic, fatalistic, or presentist impulses. Too many lessons encourage students to judge whether something was a “blessing or a curse,” a “hero or a villain,” or is “with us still today.” In other cases, specifics have been blurred into a backdrop behind the main stage of skills development, with nonfiction literacy and evidence-based argumentation prevailing over the stakes and textures of a historical episode.

Undoubtedly, many weaknesses in curriculum are inherent to the task at hand; to teach the typical middle or high school US history course, teachers are obliged to skim the surface of an impossibly deep pool of scholarship and source material. All teachers must be ruthless editors and assemblers, and they are unlikely to be equally expert in every topic. Surveyed teachers were not shy in admitting where they felt the need for more training (see Fig. 34).

 

The following sections summarize the strengths, weaknesses, and patterns in various kinds of curricular materials focused on six topics: Native American History; the Founding Era; Westward Expansion; Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction; the Gilded Age and Progressive Era; and the Civil Rights Movement. These topics fall within the standard span of chronologically organized US history, have been known to provoke politicized controversy, or have been perceived by historians as areas where there is likely to be a lag or gap between scholarly consensus and broader public knowledge. We began by assuming that K–12 materials would not reflect the latest theoretical disputes within every academic subfield, but that classroom accounts of US history should be free from factual errors and ideological distortions. We tracked factual content, looked for discredited interpretations, and took note of any distorting ideological emphases. Our judgments are meant to highlight patterns of strength and weakness across a vast archive of representative material, not to scorn or praise.

Between Mythbusting and Historiography

Some subsets of curricula (and a few state standards) adopt a self-aware perspective on the construction of historical knowledge. Some of these gestures—as in Florida standards’ call to have students “describe the roles of historians and recognize varying historical interpretations,” or a Washington unit’s promise to “consider how stories about historical events in US History have changed over time and why”—would likely be appreciated and applauded by historians.⁴ The modern historical discipline would be unrecognizable without the fundamental insight that historical interpretation is itself historically constructed.

But what is common sense among historians is only subtext in most curricula and is notoriously tough to teach.⁵ Metacritique of storytelling is rarely as compelling as a good story. The various inquiry activities or research projects that direct students to construct an evidence-based argument using primary documents (such as C3 Inquiries, DBQ, SHEG, and so on) at least imply that history is an ongoing series of investigative exercises with diverse findings, rather than a fixed monologue about the past. Missing from these modules, however, is an appreciation for how historians argue over, reconcile, or synthesize diverse interpretations, and why (and when) certain accounts become a matter of consensus while others fall out of favor. Historians’ term for this terrain—historiography—is buried in most K–12 curricula. Indeed, among the 10 skill sets whose importance we asked teachers to rate, “introducing students to historiographical debates” was the clear loser, with only 21 percent of teachers rating it as important or very important.⁶ There are certainly glimmers of historiographic consciousness in some materials, and pedagogical initiatives are attempting to provide teachers with sturdier modules for exploring the topic with K–12 students.⁷

More often, however, curricula that aim for the concept of history-as-historical-construction land somewhere outside of the historiographic conversation, striking a generically skeptical posture toward a “mainstream” or “dominant narrative” that is in need of disruption or redirection.⁸ Such provocations tend toward imprecision, unhelpfully muddying the difference between what historians mean by an “interpretation” (an evidence-based, narrative argument about the causes or implications of social change) and how the broader public applies that term (well, that’s just your interpretation—your opinion).

Among the topics we appraised, the American Revolution and the Civil Rights Movement stood out as the eras most likely to include some historiographic self-awareness. Surveyed teachers made multiple mentions of their commitment to telling a more complete, updated account of these topics than had existed before, and some instructional materials on these subjects included explicit discussions of how distinct generations of historians developed new and competing arguments. Beyond their richness as mature subfields, why would these two eras earn more nuanced treatment in curricula? Doesn’t their role as totems of civic nationalism and moral authority imply the opposite—that they are ripe for sentimentalism, distortion, and instrumentalization? It seems plausible that the civic weight assigned to these subjects are in fact what whets the appetite of the broader public for more sophisticated understandings, directing some historians toward public scholarship. The revolution and civil rights attract big events and big funders, financing opportunities for historians to inject fresh snippets of academic debate into the cycles of media, museums, memorials, movies, and curricular material that cover these topics. This model may be difficult to follow for more neglected topics. Native American history, while certainly an interest for many and a matter of political importance for contemporary tribal nations, sits uncomfortably alongside national civic sensibilities, while events since 1970 merge directly into contemporary political disagreements, a scenario that many teachers prefer to avoid.

Native American History

Of the topics appraised by the AHA research team, curricular coverage of Native American history is the most likely to blur into generalities and the least likely to reflect recent scholarship from professional historians. Surveyed teachers confess to feelings of inadequacy on this topic.⁹

In standards and curricula, coverage of Native Americans tends to cluster in a few key moments along the traditional arc of the US history timeline: precolonial North America; the era of encounter and colonization; treaty-making and Indian removal during the pre–Civil War era of US westward expansion and annexation; and the Plains Wars of the 1860s–90s. Coverage of Native American history in these particular eras is usually unobjectionable insofar as accuracy is concerned, but a tendency toward generalization predominates. In state standards, for example, all Native Americans tend to be grouped together (often in a “such as” list alongside women, African Americans, and other “minority groups”) that have “contributed to” or been “affected by” some historical event. Local curricula repeat these broad strokes—referring to a “Native American way of life,” for instance.¹⁰ In other cases, a particularly vivid episode (the Trail of Tears, the Sand Creek Massacre, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School) stands in for a diverse range of temporally adjacent Native histories.¹¹ This approach is preferable to neglect, but curricula seldom include clear guidance about the relative representativeness of a given event with respect to broader understandings of Native history during a particular era. In a handful of curricular materials, an account of the first half of US history somehow is given without any direct mention of Indians.¹²

Our research corroborates findings by other scholars detailing the sharp drop-off of coverage of Indians after the close of the Plains Wars.¹³ A particularly blunt summary in an Alabama unit plan sums up the implied thesis of many curricula: “Conquered, the Native American way of life is all but lost and assimilated into a new American Nation.”¹⁴ Exceptions appear in the civil rights era, where the American Indian Movement notably (but infrequently) receives mention. Time devoted to other 20th-century topics—the Indian Reorganization Act (1934), the Indian Relocation Act (1956), the mobilization of Indian soldiers during World War II, or urban Indian communities—is rarer but tends to appear when making a self-conscious attempt to include Native American history across multiple units. If measured simply by the distribution of expository coverage of Native history, US history textbooks reinforce the theme of Native disappearance in the 20th century. Still, 21st-century textbook authors and editors clearly consider Native Americans to be significant historical actors, threading a throughline of maps, images, and special sections covering turning points for Native people in North America. In some cases, paid curricular resources provide teachers and students with detailed histories of specific events that are less commonly cited in standards or broad timelines.¹⁵

One of the most powerful antidotes to the tendency toward the abstract Indian is the required study of state and local history. State history mandates in some places force curriculum into exceptionally specific (and by extension, nuanced and textured) treatments of Native Americans as local peoples with rooted histories in a particular place (Fig. 35). The TEKS, for example, have only broad mention of Indigenous topics in the US history standards but specify coverage of local Native groups in 4th and 7th grade Texas history.¹⁶ Virginia’s SOLs likewise show efforts to ground Native history in local contexts.¹⁷ States with a substantial contemporary presence of federally recognized tribes and Native populations are even likelier to reserve more curricular time and space for Native American history. Colorado, Minnesota, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon, South Dakota, Washington, and Wyoming all distinguish themselves by including a visible strand of Native American history in their state standards or legislating a curricular inclusion.¹⁸

 

In state standards that arrange subject matter chronologically, Native people typically appear in the first named unit of study, a massive span stretching from precolonial Indigenous civilizations of the Americas to the era of European colonization. Unfortunately, a short unit at the opening of a middle school academic year is often the subject’s only occasion for advanced study within US history courses. Twenty-four percent of teachers identified this era before colonization as among the most difficult to cover—the third most cited among all topics.¹⁹ Thirty-eight percent of those acknowledged that their difficulties were due to a lack of college coursework and supportive resources. Some teachers said that they simply “need more content knowledge” and “updated materials.”²⁰ As one Iowa teacher lamented, “I want to make [Native history] a basis for all units and just don’t feel I do it justice.”²¹ Others sensed a disjuncture between archaeological and historical modes of interpretation, with one Washington teacher citing “the lack of precolonial texts” as confounding their construction of “compelling narratives.”²² Others still “struggle with how specific the learning needs to be.”²³ As a Pennsylvania teacher put it, “This is such a long period of time that spans an entire hemisphere. . . . Figuring out what to include is overwhelming.”²⁴

More complete attempts to embrace this immense topic deploy geography to specify and locate Indigenous groups by region and to describe how distinct physical environments influenced Native societies.²⁵ Most textbooks open their Indigenous civilizations unit with an ethnolinguistic map of the continent’s various groups, but such maps tend to present a snapshot of 1492, and curricula will refer to prior eras as broadly “prehistoric.”²⁶ More nuanced curricula also go some way in upending stereotypes of the “ecological Indian,” noting that Native groups transformed North American landscapes at least as much as they adapted to them.²⁷ Guidance from state standards occasionally gestures toward the diversity of Indigenous America by “highlight[ing] the rich culture that existed in the Americas prior to colonization,” for example.²⁸ But teachers in states with content-detailed standards clearly notice the relative vagueness of Indigenous history as compared with other topics. Nearly every teacher from Texas and Virginia who noted difficulties covering precolonial Native America cited its absence in state standards. As one Texas teacher quipped, “It’s not covered on the STAAR test so it ‘isn’t important.’”²⁹

Stronger curricular guidance treats Native history with the dignity of specificity, naming Native groups and anchoring them in regional geography. In curricula covering colonial North America, Native groups are incorporated quite frequently, and individual polities and people do indeed get named and narrated: nations like the Wampanoag, Huron, Mohawk, Iroquois; figures including Metacom, Powhatan, Pocahontas. Still, Europeans are more likely to be granted their regional and cultural diversity (even when isolated to English ventures), while Native nations are collapsed into a single entity. Native groups may even be paired for analysis with other non-Europeans, as in prompts that ask, “What motivated freed Africans and Indigenous people to fight on behalf of the Patriots or the British?”³⁰ Gestures toward disaggregation provide a better start, such as comparing different colonial approaches to relations with Native groups in North America.³¹ But even here, assumptions that colonists called the shots speed past an opportunity to explore the political and commercial conduct of distinct Native groups. Dominant themes in the past generation of historiography on Indigenous America, including the political agency, diplomatic leverage, and sovereignty claims wielded by Native polities deep into the era of Euro-American colonization, lie dormant in many K–12 expositions of Native history. ³²

Problems of abstraction and timelessness in Native history have not been solved by various gestures of sensitivity, sympathy, or a decolonized pedagogy.³³ Debates both within and between distinct disciplinary approaches to Native North America occasionally echo across K–12 curricula; framings that some Indigenous studies scholars may find acceptable might be resisted by some historians and vice versa.³⁴ On the continent’s earliest human inhabitants, textbooks offer recaps of the latest archaeological evidence about Clovis and pre-Clovis cultures and migrations via land bridges, glacial, and coastal routes.³⁵ Elsewhere, some curricula cloud Indigenous history in mists of uncertainty, as in one big city curriculum that centers Indigenous creation stories while disavowing the question of how the Americas were populated, asserting that historical answers “are still unknown.”³⁶ In another large district, recently introduced curricula reinvest in essentializing depictions of Indigenous and “Judeo-Christian” civilizations as motivated by underlying theological approaches to land use: Indians as “symbiotic,” “cyclical” stewards of the environment and European settlers as inherently obsessed with “dominion.”³⁷ Some recent state standards proposals invoke Indigenous studies as part of a mission of revaluing “marginalized perspectives” and “non-dominant” narratives but articulate no specific historical content about Native people.³⁸ While perhaps well-intentioned, these approaches obscure the political, cultural, and material contexts that shaped diverse Native American societies and empires.

The framing of Native history as a moral quandary for contemporary Americans is a recurrent theme in classroom coverage, expressed clearly in the various essential and guiding questions that teachers pose or are encouraged to pose to their students.³⁹ Sometimes these are clumsy rankings or flat binaries, as in an assessment that asks, “Who colonized the New World Best?”, a debate on whether “Sitting Bull [was] an American Hero,” or a resource that asks students to choose whether they want to make a Wanted poster or a Hero poster for a Comanche war chief.⁴⁰ Attempts to squeeze Native history into civic frames are common, as in a prompt that asks how America was “a land of political, economic and social opportunities for indigenous peoples.”⁴¹ Elsewhere, district guidance awkwardly encourages teachers to take a mythbusters approach, asking students to surface their own stereotypes about Indians in order to demonstrate that Native history has been distorted.⁴² In other cases, questions about Native history are posed as policy issues to be debated: “Should the United States have allowed American Indians to retain their tribal identities?” “Have Native Americans been treated fairly by the United States government?” “Why do you think the government does not give back the stolen land to the Native American nations it was taken from?”⁴³

In more than a few instances, questions about Native history take an affective turn.⁴⁴ Some districts have developed lessons around progressive civic rituals, asking students to design their own land acknowledgment or to fill in the blanks on a premade template.⁴⁵ Occasionally, historical Indians are recruited as a set of perspectives through which to evaluate contemporary civic questions. Having students use Native American history to decide whether they “want to be part of the environment or dominate the environment” is likely asking too much of students and of Native history.⁴⁶

Placing episodes of Native American history within larger thematic or comparative units has the potential to move teachers and students away from civic meditations, but here Native American histories also get divorced from their political contexts. Comparing “Native and Mexican American struggles” or whether “Native American and African American experiences [were] similar in nineteenth-century America” might lead students toward the discovery of unique and contrasting histories. But in listing optional examples of a “struggle for equality over time,” placing Wounded Knee alongside the Seneca Falls Convention and the Freedom Riders likely stretches the thematic tent too far.⁴⁷

More successful attempts at thematic organization take seriously the continuities and consequences that run between successive eras of federal Indian policy and Native social and political life today. A Connecticut unit takes a long view, directing teachers to trace “shifts in policy and social opinion . . . that led to removal in the 1800s and relocation in the 1950s and the impact of these forced migrations . . . reservation sovereignty and the assimilation efforts both desired and forced.”⁴⁸ As with other topics we appraised, stronger lessons on Native history deploy perspective-taking as a constructive route to understanding the historical contingencies and cultural contexts that defined moments of encounter or conflict. These can appear reductive, as in activities that ask students to create fictionalized journal entries or fill-in speech bubbles for both wagon train settlers and Plains Indians in the 1840s.⁴⁹ But insofar as they go beyond the initial act of imagination and invite students to read about the outlooks, interests, ambitions, and anxieties that individuals brought to a crucial moment, this is a step in the right direction. More sophisticated lessons put students directly among Native and US perspectives. A lesson in Iowa on the Horse Creek Treaty and Fort Laramie Treaty asks students to examine the historical peculiarities and civic legacies of 19th-century treaty-making.⁵⁰ Some lessons enrich the era of removal by taking competing perspectives within Native polities seriously. A unit that asks “What path offered the best chance of survival for the Cherokee in the Early 1800s: staying in their original territory or removal to the West?” offers multiple points of view from within a single Indian nation.⁵¹ In contrast to the tendency to assemble a list of Native leaders into a portrait gallery of military resistance, lessons like these give teachers time and space to treat individual Indigenous leaders as historical actors facing complex and contested decisions.

The Founding Era

Of the six topic areas we appraised, the founding era is most readily recruited for acts of popular and civic memory. It is the top producer of recognizable historical figures (Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton), core texts (the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and Bill of Rights), and political watchwords (freedom, democracy, equality). For state legislators, founding documents are something like a renewable political resource. They are the one set of primary sources that earn explicit mention in legislation aimed at shoring up civic education or patriotism among the young (Fig. 36).

 

 

Prominent civic education nonprofits benefit from these waves of attention, producing a high volume of K–12 curricular content that speaks specifically to the founding era. iCivics, the Bill of Rights Institute, and the National Constitution Center provide resources frequently cited by teachers. Over half of surveyed teachers named the American Revolution and founding era among their three favorite topics to teach—the highest of any subject area. The founding was also the second highest ranked topic (after the Civil Rights Movement) for high-priority coverage. Asked to explain, teachers most cited the notion of a civic origin story. As one Connecticut teacher put it, learning about the founding is “knowing what being American was supposed to be and how our government was set up.”⁵²

Historians of the revolution and early republic have periodically had difficulty squaring their view of a dynamic and diversifying subfield with the folk enthusiasms and civic rationales that have kept the founding era alive in K–12 curriculum and popular culture.⁵³ Since the 1990s, a steady production of consumable histories of the revolutionary generation, including bestselling biographies, HBO miniseries, and a hip-hop Broadway musical, has been fed by the work of some historians while drawing sharp criticism from others.⁵⁴ In the second half of the 2010s, the traditional choreography for public fights over the founding shifted, with some progressives reviving formerly impolite stances against the founding itself.⁵⁵ The most prominent critical take was the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project.⁵⁶ Conservatives seized on the publication’s civic provocation—that Americans should equate their nation’s “true founding” with slavery and racism.⁵⁷ As the titles of several rejoinders made clear—President Trump’s 1776 Commission, Hillsdale College’s 1776 Curriculum, and the 1776 Unites Campaign—some conservatives sought to reassert the virtue and primacy of the revolution against its detractors. The ensuing culture wars, which included 11 state bills that singled out the 1619 Project for prohibition, proceeded without addressing the question at issue: What version of the American founding were students actually learning?

In state standards with specified chronological content, the founding era is never absent. In some cases, the founders even earn a quotation in the introductory statements of state education agencies, as officials invoke free self-government to justify the function of social studies education.⁵⁸ In many states, the era gets a double dose of coverage, with civics and government classes dwelling on the founding and often assessing content knowledge in a state-mandated civics test (on the books in 18 states).⁵⁹ Civic imperatives weigh heavily on the structure of some textbook and curricular units, pitching toward a Constitution-centered exposition. (The widely used iCivics curriculum refers to its revolutionary-era material as the “Road to the Constitution.”⁶⁰ ) In some cases, the pressure to make the era’s events relevant to civic questions or contemporary issues produces awkward framings: “What has changed since then? What hasn’t?” Clumsy jumps to the present can be especially jarring in C3-style inquiry arc lessons, which are designed to end with a student-designed plan to “take informed action.” One Washington lesson on the dynamics of loyalty and opposition during the revolution ends with students being asked whether they will stand or kneel the next time the national anthem is played or Pledge of Allegiance is recited.⁶¹ In another, an inquiry centered on the Boston Tea Party is meant to prepare students to “identify an example of injustice in their school or community.”⁶²

While many instructional materials instill a sense of drama in the lead-up to independence, the sudden shift to founding documents after the revolution often drains the early republic of its verve.⁶³ As a Washington teacher explained, the early republic “is the unit that I teach civics and government.”⁶⁴ The “3 branches of Government, Electoral College, 3/5 Compromise, Bill of Rights, impeachment, etc.” was as much as one Alabama teacher said they had time for once past the revolution.⁶⁵ The early national period was far less popular than the revolution among surveyed teachers and selected as challenging by 32 percent. Teachers cited the difficulty of convincing students that “the growing pains . . . [of] being a brand new nation” was in fact a “big deal.”⁶⁶ Others had trouble getting themselves excited about the era. In the words of a Virginia teacher: “War of 1812, Era of Good feelings? Just skip ahead to Jackson.”⁶⁷

As “first half” US history topics, the American Revolution and early republic suffer when course sequences split content between middle and high school. In at least 23 states, advanced study of the founding era is not mandated at the high school level. This might account for some noticeable limitations in coverage. Seen from one angle, curricula on the revolution remain anchored in traditional modes of historical narrative, with a focus on elite political actors, pivotal moments of rebellion, the military chronicle of the War for Independence, and a focus on founding documents. The Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights are sometimes accompanied by excerpts from Common Sense, the Articles of Confederation, the Federalist Papers, Washington’s Farewell Address, and Paul Revere’s engraving of the Boston Massacre. Textbooks echo these notes by including the standard documents in special sections or back matter. The curricula across our sample states show broad agreement regarding the main characters, events, and documents worthy of coverage.

Consensus doesn’t preclude nuanced treatment, however. Historians might wonder at the persistence of “salutary neglect” as a conceptual frame for 18th-century British North America, but they would find less to argue with in the many lessons that capture the competing perspectives, contingent decisions, and escalating misunderstandings that took colonists from resistance to rebellion to independence.⁶⁸ Indeed, when we asked surveyed teachers to articulate what they felt was most worth remembering about the era, an emphasis on contingency and complex causation prevailed—more so than in their discussion of other topics.⁶⁹ Teachers remind students that “it was a complicated, divisive time” and “that it wasn’t a foregone conclusion” with “no guarantee of success when it all started.”⁷⁰ The notion of “multiple perspectives” can come across as something of a shallow slogan in social studies. But in some units on the American Revolution, the different perspectives among British and colonial actors are presented as dynamic and complex causes of historical change, rather than simply evidence of diverse points of view.⁷¹ Many teachers stressed the notion of divided sentiment (loyalists versus patriots) as an indicator of the conflict’s uncertain outcome.⁷² Asking whether the revolution was avoidable or how the Constitution’s many compromises were generated, as a number of lessons do, pulls students above the fray to see how differing points of view actually propelled conflict, why chronology matters, and pushes them to contemplate how things might have turned out differently.⁷³

A variety of activities ask students to put themselves in the position of a colonist or a British official at various stages of the conflict: investigating the crime scene at the Boston Massacre; judging the strategic wisdom of the Boston Tea Party; assessing the arguments of loyalists and patriots; deciding whether to quit or persevere at Valley Forge; reenacting the Constitutional Convention debates over the Great Compromise.⁷⁴ Role-playing lessons have become more and more sophisticated, aided by video-gamified platforms and an expansion of roles beyond binary choices (loyalist versus patriot; Federalist versus Antifederalist). One newer unit on the revolution divides the question of independence into three options—loyalty, neutrality, or rebellion—and then further disambiguates each position with sources from colonists, Native people, and enslaved and free Black people. Rather than render a single judgment, students are assigned distinct historical roles—such as a Quaker merchant, an immigrant barmaid, a frontier farmer, an enslaved teenager, or a female Wampanoag sachem—with the expectation that each will come to a distinct conclusion about the conflict.⁷⁵ In another widely used unit, a gamified version of the ratification debates puts students in the role of a pamphleteer who, on the basis of interviews with various social types from across the newly independent states, must make a case either for or against the Constitution.⁷⁶ These approaches offer advantages: an emphasis on the social geography of colonial and postrevolutionary societies; a sense of the distinct material and intellectual problems that Independence and the Constitution were proposing to solve; and the notion that the outcome was “far from certain.”⁷⁷ But a full immersion in inclusive role-playing scenarios may blur the real distinctions of status, power, and leverage that distinct social groups wielded during the 18th century. A sense of the real events may be tough to discern after a student has chosen their own adventure. From what we can infer about actual teacher practice, these are likely minor concerns; teachers deploy role-play as a supplement, not a substitute, for direct instruction about the course of events.

A few lessons address historical interpretation and introduce students to historiographic debates. Sometimes, debates are framed too bluntly, as in a side-by-side (and perhaps unfair) choice between Howard Zinn and Bernard Bailyn.⁷⁸ Elsewhere, as in an inquiry task that asks students to assess the radicalism of the American Revolution, a spread of historiographic positions is summarized—but the scholarship referenced ends in the 1990s.⁷⁹ More common than historiographic engagement were surveyed teachers’ many references to a set of “myths” that they suspected their students may have absorbed in elementary school or by way of “marble statues” that freeze the founders in civic memory. In broad strokes, surveyed teachers expressed a commitment to nuance and complexity, reminding students that the revolution resists a “good guys versus bad guys” plot, and that an appreciation for the great leaders and great achievements of republicanism requires a sense of what now might appear “flawed” and “imperfect.”⁸⁰ Mythbusting, however, often requires teachers to cover the myth in order to refute it. A worthy ambition in one Washington unit to “tell untold stories” of the revolution relies on portraying the 1975 cartoon Schoolhouse Rock as if it were still a “commonly told” version of the founding.⁸¹ A unit in a large Illinois district extends critical postures into blunt abstractions, setting the revolution and early republic under an umbrella of “Power, Privilege, and Oppression.”⁸² The unit exemplifies the tensions between “critical” and “inclusive” histories; the names of ordinary and marginal people earn mention while revolutionary leaders are disappeared into “systems of power.”⁸³

Notwithstanding the many incentives to diversify and complicate traditional versions of the founding, many teachers clearly find the high drama of elite politics an irresistible part of teaching the subject. Several positively referenced the popularity of the Broadway musical, enjoying “an excuse to watch Hamilton in class.”⁸⁴ A Hamilton versus Jefferson framing of the politics of the early republic provides a durable framework for lessons. Combined with document-based role-playing activities, these are fine opportunities for students to historicize and dramatize the decision-making that drove important events. It’s also clear that teachers and curricular developers are eager to lend that same sense of drama to the disruptions and decisions that nonelites faced during the revolutionary moment. In recent decades, historical scholarship has greatly expanded the revolutionary narrative to include a wide range of participants, a heightened appreciation for the contingency of the imperial crisis, a transnational Atlantic milieu, the disruptions and transformations to land and labor, the consequences for pro- and antislavery politics, a prominent role for Native Americans, and analyses of gender, environment, consumer culture, print culture, and honor culture, to name just a few topics.⁸⁵

The need to present the revolution’s legacy as a balancing act between achievements and flaws suggests a strong urge to draw lessons and legacies from the founding era across longer spans of time. Here, some ideological inflections were apparent. In one subset were teachers who stressed the founding as inspiration, an exemplary story of bravery and unity among underdogs who bore great risks and awful costs to stand against tyranny. For these teachers, the revolution imparts a clear lesson (echoed in teacher responses about the Civil Rights Movement) that Americans must continue to be protective of their rights and “stand up for themselves” against oppression.⁸⁶ Another group of teachers hoped that students would remember the revolution’s limitations: that American notions of liberty, equality, and rights were neither imagined for nor enjoyed by people who were not “rich white landowners.”⁸⁷ Other teachers referenced the participation (rather than the exclusion) of nonelites (slaves, women, servants, farmers), making some version of the case that the revolution “was fought by everyone.”⁸⁸ One Virginia teacher split the difference between pluralism and pessimism, explaining, “women and African Americans made significant contributions but did not benefit from the revolution in the same way that white men did.”⁸⁹ The most common ideological synthesis among teachers described the founding as an expansive and unfinished struggle—a combination of teachers’ historical sense of the American Revolution’s unexpected outcome and narrow social origins with their civic faith in democracy and equality. As an Illinois teacher summed up, “it’s a work in progress.”⁹⁰

Westward Expansion

John Gast’s painting American Progress is one of the most assigned sources for students studying westward expansion. It appears everywhere from textbooks to document activities and teacher slideshows. Its title and its depictions of light and darkness, Native Americans, buffalo, wagons, trains, settlers, waterways, and the female figure of Columbia leading the way allow students to question the assumptions behind its 1872 creation and explore the stories that 19th-century Americans told about their migration and settlement in the trans-Mississippi West.⁹¹ But the painting is also a handy symbol for the overemphasis on the concept of Manifest Destiny that predominates in K–12 materials.⁹² Some teachers acknowledge, as much recent historiography stresses, the contingency of how westward expansion occurred “in stages for various reasons.”⁹³ Perhaps only a handful of teachers today present westward expansion as “inevitable,” but a certain tragic fatalism about the history of the West still prevails.⁹⁴ As one teacher put it, “The country had to grow, but unfortunately at the expense of Native Americans.”⁹⁵ Maps of 19th-century territorial acquisitions and dates are a standard visual reference in most textbooks, necessary context that nonetheless can reinforce a deterministic sense of westward expansion. Some teachers and instructional materials have made conscious efforts to avoid this trap, moving beyond the broad outline to root these processes in local stories that do not require an emphasis on Manifest Destiny for students to understand this history.

Many teachers present westward expansion as a mixed bag of “pros and cons” or “good and bad” changes, leaving it up to students to draw their own conclusions about its meaning. A few place significant emphasis on character, telling students that “explorers and settlers were determined and resilient” with “grit,” while still noting “the costs.”⁹⁶ Meanwhile, a different subset of teachers focus on what they see as the injustices of the era, in some cases using academic terms like “settler colonialism” to emphasize systemic and ideological continuities across broader time spans and geographies.⁹⁷ These teachers may point to the ongoing rationale for later imperialist ventures beyond North America as a key to the present, fueling “our belief in American exceptionalism and nationalistic pride.”⁹⁸

Some events most commonly included in this unit are the Louisiana Purchase, the Mexican American War, the Mormon migration to Utah, discoveries of gold, and the Homestead Act. Teachers also cover developing technologies in the form of canals, steamboats, railroads, and telegraphs that accelerated expansion and altered concepts of time and space.⁹⁹ Though much of westward expansion takes place before the Civil War, topics such as the Homestead Act and railroads carry into and past 1865. This can make coverage of the topic into the 1860s and early 1870s challenging, given most teachers focus on the Civil War and Reconstruction in those decades. This break in the focus on westward expansion is further reinforced by the fact that most first-half and second-half US history courses end and begin in 1877–a break that can last several years between middle and high school coursework.

Surveyed teachers want to ensure their students understand the West was “not just barren land,” even if they lack the time to delve into Indigenous history.¹⁰⁰ Indian removal, specifically the Trail of Tears, frequently is taught in this era but often disconnected from the broader story of westward expansion.¹⁰¹ Rarely do standards or curriculum give much detail about the dozens of distinct efforts undertaken by Native tribes to resist or determine the path of their removal. And seldom does the curriculum tie the removal of Indians to other antebellum events, including the expansion of slavery.¹⁰² A significant number of teachers connect westward expansion to slavery and the Civil War, but the common organization of units with titles such as “Road to the Civil War” makes it likely that Native removal will be told as a tragic standalone, while events such as the Missouri Compromise are swept into forward motion as a preface to the war.¹⁰³ Connecting removal, slavery, and sectionalism—as New York’s standards gesture toward—is the exception rather than the rule.¹⁰⁴

While many lesson plans continue to present westward expansion as white people dispossessing Native peoples of their lands, a growing number of resources present the West as a more dynamic and diverse place, especially after the Civil War.¹⁰⁵ Teachers and content providers emphasize the region’s diverse communities to push against “classic Hollywood stereotypes” of white, loner cowboys.¹⁰⁶ Even within the broader outline of this core conflict, some teachers present the topic “not merely a simple one vs. one event but rather a multi-decade long series of conflicts between settlers, state militias, federal military, and numerous tribes.”¹⁰⁷ In many cases, lessons try to incorporate as many identities as possible, including women, Chinese, and African Americans, to answer broader questions about the range of actors and how they are described.¹⁰⁸ While Rhode Island’s standards describe westward expansion as the “westward movement of white Americans,” other approaches address immigration as an important part of the story of how Americans moved west.¹⁰⁹ This is also the topic in which teachers are most likely to discuss the history of the environment, including how western landscapes were shaped and altered in this process. For example, one Texas district curriculum asks, “How did westward expansion affect the landscape and people that interacted with it?”¹¹⁰

A local approach to westward expansion helps to ground this vast history in specific and relevant details; this is true even in places outside the West. For example, New York state standards make connections between the history of the Erie Canal and westward expansion.¹¹¹ Michigan’s standards bring in the Treaty of Chicago and the Treaty of Fort Wayne.¹¹² In Colorado, they explore the state’s gold rush.¹¹³ Many states in the West and Midwest credit railroads as the central engine for development, and this is reflected in their lessons.¹¹⁴ A Colorado lesson allows students to explore Denver’s development through city and railroad maps of the surrounding region.¹¹⁵ One Washington teacher noted the relevance of place, writing, “As I live and teach in the West and my school is named to honor a local native chief, the effects of Westward Expansion on the native cultures is always embedded in this topic.”¹¹⁶ National curriculum providers also present in-depth histories of specific places, Native nations, and conflicts while connecting these to themes such as “cultural misunderstanding, adaptation, cooperation, and conflict.”¹¹⁷

On the other hand, some curriculum plans indicate overly general questions and descriptions that give students the wrong impression about the significance of westward expansion. A lesson from one Texas district reads, “Migration of large numbers of people tend to create big changes.” The map paired with the lesson goes on to define westward expansion as an inevitable process: “Manifest Destiny led to the settlement of the West and the expansion of American territory to the Pacific Ocean by 1850.”¹¹⁸ More commonly, teachers impose Manifest Destiny as the explanation for all of westward expansion in a way that extends beyond the events that actually occurred.¹¹⁹ Some lesson plans take immigration and “urban crowding” as an inevitable force for westward expansion.¹²⁰ Role playing activities, such as a “Land Run Simulation” regularly with this topic, may give students the wrong impression about westward expansion as a process without costs or allow stereotypes to fill in the gaps.¹²¹ The varied religious, sectional, national, and economic goals that contributed to westward expansion—and the role of Native people in shaping and stalling its dynamics—do not always get the full attention of teachers and students. A close reading of Gast’s American Progress is a fine start, but many teachers would be excited to learn how historians of the West now paint a different picture without Manifest Destiny as the core concept.

Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction

The Civil War is a popular topic among teachers, with 30 percent of surveyed teachers choosing it as their favorite—the fourth highest ranked among all eras.¹²² Based on our interviews, surveys, and curricula appraisals, there no longer appears to be any serious controversy among teachers about slavery’s central role as the cause of the Civil War.¹²³ Virtually all teachers we surveyed are teaching their students that the Civil War was “about slavery,” as one respondent put it.¹²⁴ Perceiving that students arrive to the study of slavery with pre-existing assumptions (such as the Lost Cause mythology), teachers pointedly call out these misconceptions. For example, in a classroom activity used in a large Texas district, students look at 2011 polling data showing widespread public opinion that states’ rights, rather than slavery, was the main cause of the war. Students are asked to compare those results with what they’ve learned and to discuss how these responses might have changed in recent years.¹²⁵ The signals are clear: teachers expect students to know that slavery was the core issue of the Civil War. Of surveyed teachers, 71 percent listed slavery and the antebellum South as a high-priority topic.¹²⁶

Yet slavery still could be covered more comprehensively. Slavery was singled out by teachers as a uniquely challenging topic due to its potential for controversy. In our survey, 21 percent of teachers reported that slavery was challenging to teach, peaking at 29 percent in Iowa and Pennsylvania.¹²⁷ When asked why, 43 percent of those teachers said it provokes conflict, a much higher percentage than any other content area in our survey. This latter statistic sets slavery even further apart from other challenging topics, where teachers pointed instead to time constraints, lack of training, or lack of student interest as the major hurdles.¹²⁸ For teachers who said they had personally experienced objections to anything they taught, slavery was by far the leading specified topic of controversy.¹²⁹ The pressure that teachers perceive regarding the teaching of slavery can come from a number of directions: conservatives claiming that slavery is divisive, students disengaging because they feel that it’s been done too much, or parents preferring that African American history emphasize postemancipation triumphs over the sorrows of slavery.¹³⁰

Unlike most other content areas that can be more neatly periodized (e.g., Jacksonian America, the Civil War, the New Deal), slavery coexists with the entirety of the first half of US history. Even so, curricular coverage of slavery clusters around particular historical moments, especially constitutional debates and plantation slavery in the antebellum South, the latter often standing in for the various practices and cultures of slavery that existed throughout the United States before 1865. In most curricula, these eras are presented primarily as a political story: rising tensions, diverging economies, competing interpretations of the Constitution, and an increasing sense of morality. In the classroom, characters like Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Harriett Beecher Stowe, William Lloyd Garrison, or Robert E. Lee typically drive the story. Students read core documents such as Douglass’s 1852 “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro” and Lincoln’s 1858 acceptance speech for the Republican nomination.¹³¹ Common events include the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Compromise of 1850, and John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. During the war itself, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Battles of Antietam and Gettysburg, and the surrender at Appomattox are presented as the key turning points and events to understand.

Beyond Douglass, the rich historiography regarding free and enslaved Black people’s role in abolition rarely appears.¹³² Students often learn about ordinary Black freedmen from a classroom viewing of the 1989 film Glory.¹³³ Likewise, evidence of what slavery was like and how it changed appears in some cases but is usually limited.¹³⁴ Textbooks generally include information about the daily lives of enslaved people, though perhaps in recognition of the younger audience, they skirt important violent aspects such as sexual assault. The textbooks we appraised had a separate chapter section dedicated to social life under slavery.¹³⁵ In modular primary source lessons, however, students are more likely to learn about slavery by examining runaway slave advertisements. These sources document the cruelty of enslavement without much sense of the interior lives and desires of the enslaved.

The study of Reconstruction usually occurs at the end of the first half of the US history course, which could come at the end of a semester or school year, depending on state and local course sequencing. This is a logical placement, but it relies on strict pacing to ensure enough time to study the topic. Indeed, 62 percent of teachers who described teaching Reconstruction as challenging listed time constraints as the reason. Many teachers present both the “successes and failures” but tend to focus more on the “challenges and failures of Reconstruction policies.”¹³⁶ As one Pennsylvania teacher put it, “We started a path of change but quit when it was getting hard.”¹³⁷ Students learn not only about the federal government’s role but are frequently asked, “How did African Americans work to improve their lives in Reconstruction?”¹³⁸

In most locales, students are more likely to learn about the daily lives of African Americans during the study of Reconstruction than the Civil War or antebellum era. For example, a common question asks the extent to which the lives of formerly enslaved persons improved after the war. To respond students must first answer “What were the conditions of slavery before the Civil War?”¹³⁹ Students consistently learn about the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments in a Reconstruction unit. The expansion of the federal government in this period is not always explicitly covered, as the spotlight instead falls on the federal government’s failure to protect the lives and rights of freedpeople from racist violence and Redeemer state governments. Rarely do teachers describe why the will to enforce the nation’s laws foundered; there are not individual agents of change in this era so much as a generic sense of “government.” In both the Civil War and Reconstruction units, teachers point to these eras’ lasting consequences and legacy that connects to the present, with Reconstruction often described as unfinished.¹⁴⁰

Despite the national story, local variation and focus provide some of the most engaging lessons that go deeper than the dichotomies of North and South and black and white. Louisiana’s state standards include a study of “the experiences of enslaved people on the Middle Passage, at slave auctions, and on plantations,” as well as the inclusion of the “capture of New Orleans” as a major Civil War battle. In the West, students are more likely to learn about the expansion of the federal government, connecting it to conflicts with Native peoples. Rhode Island’s state standards provide evidence of Black people’s involvement in the war with the 14th Rhode Island Heavy Artillery. The state also has one of the few standards with any mention of women in relation to the Civil War.¹⁴¹

Though teachers and curriculum writers understand and convey the broad political outline of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, there are plenty of moments of misinterpretation. Rarely do curriculum documents reflect on how slavery and racism were mutually constructed and how both changed over time and place.¹⁴² White supremacy appears in some histories as a constant, unchanging feature, as opposed to a politically contingent and historically constructed phenomenon.¹⁴³ In some cases, moralistic simplifications for the origins of slavery stand in for a rich historiographic debate, reflecting ahistorical emphases similar to those we found in some Native American history lessons.¹⁴⁴ A unit in one Connecticut district was designed to treat slavery with depth and emotional resonance, but it ends up flattening the origins of racial slavery in the early modern Atlantic world by using a simplified account of “the world’s first racist” in the Portuguese royal court.¹⁴⁵ Elsewhere, the urge to connect slavery to racism’s longer arc in American life encourages imprecise and disorienting analogies. A Pennsylvania unit invites students to interpret a viral birdwatching incident in Manhattan in 2020 with reference to slave laws passed in the wake of Bacon’s Rebellion in colonial Virginia.¹⁴⁶ In contrast, material that engages with recent debates about contextualizing or removing Civil War monuments that celebrated the Confederacy are often more nuanced, sometimes even grounded in the district’s own history.¹⁴⁷ In dispelling “myths” about slavery, another lesson plan wants students to know that slaveowners did not own slaves “just to be mean.”¹⁴⁸ While the premise sounds flippant, such a prompt can be generative as a pivot to explore the matrix of economic motives that sustained slavery. Pure economism has its limits as well; while no teachers we spoke to or surveyed apologize for slavery in their courses, their efforts to explain the economic existence of slavery sometimes give it a sense of inevitability that should not be applied to either its existence or its end. Along these lines, curriculum and textbooks consistently overemphasize the importance of Eli Whitney and his cotton gin to the spread of plantation slavery.¹⁴⁹ The curriculum furthest afield came from an Alabama district that described Reconstruction as the era when “mercy turn[ed] to vengeance,” as the North left the South “humiliated and desperate.”¹⁵⁰ Few teachers seem to have an appropriate understanding of sharecropping, calling it among other things “a legal form of slavery,” missing the significance of emancipation. Often the topic of sharecropping is most clearly and accurately presented in textbooks that note its negotiation and explain the range of labor systems including sharecropping, share-tenancy, and tenant farming.¹⁵¹

Finally, a sizable minority of teachers spend excessive time in the Civil War era discussing military history, going beyond the key turning points to discuss upwards of 20 battles.¹⁵² Crash Course even recorded an episode where they “just list some facts” about battles to address teachers’ requests.¹⁵³ For some teachers, the military conduct of the war is clearly a topic of personal interest—a passion that sends them to reenactments on weekends and battlefield sites over the summer.¹⁵⁴ While these hobbies can translate to interesting field trips and artifact show-and-tells, an excessive focus on military history leaves out far too much of the other histories that students should learn about. Rarely do these battle histories explore how enslaved people freeing themselves by running to the US Army, the enlistment of freedmen, and the Emancipation Proclamation were tied to both the military necessities of the war and the process of emancipation.¹⁵⁵ Taken together, instructional treatments of the Civil War and Reconstruction are roughly in line with scholarly interpretations of the era’s political history, but the insights of social and economic history could stand to be more coherently incorporated.

Industry, Capital, and Labor

The most thematic of the six appraised content areas, “Industry, Capital, and Labor” crosses the late 19th century and early 20th centuries. Commonly grouped under the umbrella of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, these themes capture the emerging industrialized economy as it radically transformed the United States and American life.¹⁵⁶ Every shift within the economy created both grievances and opportunities. Technology surged, capital accumulated, workers organized, and a class of educated bourgeois reformers tried to dam up the resulting tensions. The many framings of this era as “the making of modern America” underscore the sense among some that the turn of the 20th century is an origin story for the second half of the US survey.¹⁵⁷

Teaching the scale of economic change after Reconstruction alone is daunting, and teachers report struggling to make it digestible. Of the 19 percent (301) of respondents who deemed the Gilded Age and Industrial America one of the three most challenging topics to teach, 66 percent further clarified that they find students too uninterested, disengaged, or academically unprepared.¹⁵⁸ Teachers frequently commented that students struggle to keep up, agreeing with one teacher who acknowledged that the era is full of “so many themes and forces that overlap” that “it can be difficult to have depth and to provide conceptual understanding, without going on and on and on.”¹⁵⁹ Another teacher responded, “There are so many threads to tie together in this time period—westward expansion, Native Americans, industrialization, immigration, fallout from Reconstruction. It’s a lot for the kids to track.”¹⁶⁰ Some reported feeling pressure to streamline the “slog,” as a Virginia teacher put it: “I either have to leave a lot out or just pretend everyone is still excited.”¹⁶¹ The Progressive Era yielded similar results, which is unsurprising given that it is most often positioned in curricula as a direct response to Gilded Age conditions.¹⁶² Teachers made a case for its relevance to students’ lives while simultaneously expressing frustration that they cannot make their students connect to the material. A Texas teacher complained, “A lot of the changes/reforms during this era have been around for 100+ years so [the students] think it is obvious.”¹⁶³ Given these obstacles, it is no surprise that most Gilded Age and Progressive Era curricula approach the eras by streamlining lesson plans, simplifying coverage, and outsourcing subject matter to documentaries that teachers can manage and students can tolerate.

Teacher sentiment perhaps can be traced to the uneven treatment of the Gilded Age in the K–12 US history sequence. Roughly half of high school US history state standards suggest or require a second-half US history course (the only US history course that the vast majority of high school students must take), usually beginning after Reconstruction in 1877. As the Gilded Age is generally covered in the first month of the semester, often at least three years after students took their last US history class (and with a new-to-them history teacher to boot), it is a difficult task for students to enter the door capable of engaging with the “complex mix of groups, ideas, and agendas that all melt into a ‘soup’ of movements throughout the early 20th century.”¹⁶⁴ Across interviews, teachers spoke of the shaky transitions between middle school and high school history classes. The Gilded Age would, of all subject areas, be the rubric content area most disadvantaged by the scope and sequence structure that constitutes something of a consensus in the United States. Even where there is a mandate for coverage of the Gilded Age, external factors can inflect the seriousness with which it is taught. As one Virginia teacher wrote, “Virginia’s [Standards of Learning] requirements/state test do not really push a lot in this area . . . so I do not stress much of it in class.”¹⁶⁵

Despite evidence of different historiographic strains in Gilded Age and Progressive Era curricula, lessons rarely align entirely with any orthodoxy. One strain is the exploration of “modernity,” a present-focused approach whereby teachers offer a collection of sometimes connected, sometimes stochastic events designed to add up to something that students can recognize in today’s United States. This emphasis is front and center in course and unit titles like the “Beginning of Modern America”’ or the “Emergence of Modern America.”¹⁶⁶ What “modernity” means is never defined, but its curricular starting line in the Gilded Age communicates a thesis: to understand the United States today, one must understand the history of accumulation—of money, people, land, resources, influence, and, as teachers often emphasize, social problems.¹⁶⁷ The accumulation of capital, in particular, is linked with the rapidly multiplying ills of Gilded Age society, whether through wealth inequality or the rise of philanthropy, both of which are covered fairly well among collected curricula. While the corporate monopoly and its mechanisms, like vertical and horizontal integration, are standard fare, materials generally avoid deeper discussion of economics or even more developed histories of blockbuster businesses like Standard Oil or J. P. Morgan and Co., while the men behind them, like John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan, appear on the scene already wealthy and influential.

Even as Gilded Age titans appear in curricula as historical forces in themselves, no one seems content to let them off the hook. Instances of soft-pedaling or skipping over some of the more disreputable actions of Gilded Age tycoons are rare. The historically acceptable but nonetheless pejorative term “robber baron” appears frequently. A few teachers note that rationalizations for wealth inequality rested on social Darwinism.¹⁶⁸ Curricula that lean into “haves” and “have-nots” framing are more likely to present one or more of a host of similarly simplified dichotomies—of “good and bad,” “winners and losers,” “positive and negative,” “better and worse”—all of which highlight the inextricable ties between capitalist accumulation and the historical evolution of more sociological or political conceptions of inequality and progress.¹⁶⁹ As five respondents said and others paraphrased, “All that glitters is not gold.”¹⁷⁰ One particularly awkward question—“Which term best describes Andrew Carnegie? Philanthropist or Robber Baron?”—highlights how curricula lean into moral questions about the Gilded Age.¹⁷¹ In these depictions, the Progressive Era is an attempt to solve the problems of the Gilded Age, often creating more problems of its own through its middle-class standards and embrace of social Darwinism, among other ideologies.¹⁷²

In a complementary framing, the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era are presented with a more sociological approach, populated by masses, systems, and ideologies. These concepts are either distilled into keywords or used as actors to drive much of the era’s “plot.” These clusters of concepts often appear with lists of nominalized verbs and adjectives: “Industry, Reform, and the West”; “Industry/Cities/Progressives/Immigration”; and “Industrialization, Progressivism, and Immigration.”¹⁷³ Framing the era through these broad concepts suggests that to understand the United States today, one must understand how the masses, through mass movement, mass politics, mass protest, mass organization, mass demographics, altered and vied for power within the American social contract.¹⁷⁴

This sociological approach can effectively convey the scale of the Gilded Age. But it is employed with varying amounts of rigor, ranging from a simplified, sociology “lite” to a deeper, more disciplined use of sociological tools in historical analysis.¹⁷⁵ On the more prevalent simplified side of the spectrum, keywords from both the Gilded Age and Progressive Era form a barrier of anonymity that only the most well-known and elite historical actors, like Carnegie and Rockefeller, can breach. Arizona’s recommended “course considerations” are representative here, suggesting coverage of the “emergence of Modern America including but not limited to industrialization, immigration and migration, progressivism, Federal Indian Policy, suffrage movements, racial, religious and class conflict, the growth of the United States as a global power and World War I and its aftermath.”¹⁷⁶ Lessons using the simplified approach certainly appear more scientific, with rapid-fire statistics and myriad graphs of varying quality, but agency among the masses is largely missing, as are connections between new immigration, unsafe workplaces, and child labor, particularly within the labor movement. More so than any other moment in US history except perhaps the invention of the cotton gin, many lessons lean into the idea of technology shaping and often “improving” daily life in this era.¹⁷⁷

A small but exemplary number of standards and curricula present industry, capital, and labor as inextricably intertwined with and in reaction to one another and historical conditions. Mississippi’s standards juxtapose these concepts and require students to understand the interaction between big concepts and individuals. Under “Industrialization,” students compare “population changes caused by industrialization,” “the nativist reaction evidenced by the Chinese Exclusion Act,” “the impact of industrialization on workers,” “living conditions linked to urbanization,” the “social gospel,” Jane Addams, and the rise of labor unions.¹⁷⁸ Teachers find ways to frame the complexity of the era through case studies of representative figures (e.g., Andrew Carnegie) or local history (e.g., the spread of technology and its hastening of migration in the post–Civil War West, or the “Silver Kings of Colorado”).¹⁷⁹ As in other content areas, some of the most helpful lessons are grounded in state and local history, asking students to consider nearby industrial sites, which may or may not still be in operation.¹⁸⁰ In one Connecticut district’s case study on the labor movement, students examine the labor context of the Gilded Age and ask “what caused the development of labor unions,” “what issues did labor organizations seek to address and what methods/tactics did they utilize,” “how did industry attempt to deter organized labor,” and “to what degree did labor unions succeed in their goals during the Gilded Age?”¹⁸¹ Other districts add texture to the labor movement, either by requiring students to “analyze the causes and effects of labor conflict in various industries and geographic regions” or learn about the “growth of labor unions and various radical movement which experienced various degrees of success in achieving their goals,” including anarchism, socialism, the American Federation of Labor, and the Industrial Workers of the World among labor’s diverse camps.¹⁸²

Despite evidence that some teachers embrace the breadth of the early eras and iterations of the labor movement, the plurality of appraised materials are anemic on labor history, particularly prior to the New Deal expansion of labor laws. Important events like the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire are included in many US history curricula, but time is rarely taken to explore labor radicalism in New York City or the complex urban politics within which the event occurred. Labeling labor unions as just another reform movement in a roiling sea of reform movements, and as a consequence of a middle-class movement for reform, rather than a complex, multifaceted, and politically diverse movement with its own dramatic narratives and consequences, does not help explain the historical highs and nadirs of workers’ rights in the United States. Teaching the labor movement as another domain of a bourgeois reform movement alongside Upton Sinclair and Theodore Roosevelt not only ignores its early history (e.g., brotherhoods, trade unionism) but cleaves it from its dramatic ascendance during the New Deal. In Pennsylvania, one district provided a packet of primary sources on the Gilded Age and reform efforts, going in-depth on capital, reform, and regulation. In 58 pages, labor unions are mentioned only in passing in sections on social Darwinism and the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.¹⁸³ On the other hand, some curricula ask questions such as “To what extent were lower class and working Americans left behind during the Progressive Era?”¹⁸⁴ And some textbooks have entire sections focused on the range of labor unions.¹⁸⁵

Despite relying more on a thematic approach than the five other appraised content areas, several key themes rarely appeared in appraised curricula, reflecting the choices teachers and curriculum providers make to avoid overwhelming students. For instance, international context for the era is rare, an unfortunate fact for the age in which the United States developed a truly global economy. Historians recognize that the era of industrialization was a global age, not just an American one, but curricular materials rarely mention other countries unless as part of a military contest. The global context for 19th-century imperialism is often left to world history classes, and the global origins of financial panics go unmentioned. Women are more likely to appear in coverage of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era than in preceding units, but a focus on the achievement of suffrage in 1920 tends to overshadow the diverse extent of women’s movements across the 19th and early 20th centuries. Even when important themes like imperialism, immigration, environment, and labor appear, the causal links between them are often left unexplored.¹⁸⁶ Immigrants are pulled to the United States, but what pushes them, beyond the rare mention of famine or war, is underemphasized. The environment and Americans’ concerns about environmental changes receive scant attention. Given how Americans’ relationship with the natural world transformed in this era, and that economic growth was fueled not simply by technology and ideology but by fossil fuels, these intersections seem particularly relevant to understanding modern America and the modern world.

The Civil Rights Movement

Two aspects set the Civil Rights Movement apart from other content areas under appraisal. The Civil Rights Movement is the only content area that can be critiqued by still-living participants and witnesses. Relatedly, coverage of the Civil Rights Movement enjoys robust and widespread support, as demonstrated across social studies standards, state law, and teacher priorities. The movement’s status as living history, civic monument, and historical turning point has put substantial pressure on all levels of public education bureaucracy to encourage curricular coverage.¹⁸⁷ Surveyed teachers ranked the Civil Rights Movement as the clear standout for priority coverage, with 81 percent identifying the topic as a “high priority.” Including those who chose “mid-priority,” the number rises to 94 percent, as close as teachers came to a unanimous statement regarding any survey question. In Alabama, where the topic’s local significance is unavoidable, the number actually reached 100 percent. Among favorites, the Civil Rights Movement ranked third with 36 percent, trailing only the founding era and World War II. Teachers in Washington and Alabama registered the highest affinity for the civil rights movement, with 47 percent and 44 percent, respectively, citing the topic among their favorites to teach. In state standards with specified historical content, the Civil Rights Movement never fails to make an appearance, and state legislatures have issued multiple signals about the era’s importance to civic knowledge.

The curricular dimensions of this topic originated with the organizers themselves. Educator-activists in successive eras forged networks for the promotion of what was then called Negro history and pushed against instructional materials that ignored or denigrated the dignity and agency of Black historical actors.¹⁸⁸ It was during the mass mobilizations of the 1960s that states first enacted laws and rules requiring the study of black (and other ethnic) accomplishments and contributions—and in some instances banning textbooks with racist depictions of African Americans.¹⁸⁹ During the late 1960s and early 1970s, some towns and cities introduced new courses or new materials with gestures toward Black studies, ethnic studies, or Afrocentric topics.¹⁹⁰ The embrace of the civil rights era itself as a pillar of civic education came later—made official in 1983 when Congress created a federal Martin Luther King Jr. Day.¹⁹¹ State legislators in the 1990s and 2000s launched a cascade of mandates, commissions, and supplementary resources on African American history. These initiatives often declined to choose between seemingly conflicting themes of trauma and triumph. As New Jersey’s Amistad Commission (2002) put it, Black history embraced “the vestiges of slavery in this country and the contributions of African-Americans to our country.”¹⁹² As Civil Rights Movement participants aged (and sometimes became lawmakers), state legislatures passed more legislation requiring the study of the movement and its major figures. Approaches varied by state, with some introducing stand-alone legislation while others married the Civil Rights Movement to existing frameworks, attaching its history to the broader study of human rights or adding the era’s key documents to a canon of required readings.¹⁹³

Echoing responses regarding the American Revolution, many surveyed teachers voiced their belief that the civil rights era imparted lessons about national character, sacrifice, and the need for active citizenship. Multiple teachers noted that the rights that students “take for granted” are owed to “the power of nonviolent activism” and the “sacrifices made by Civil Rights warriors” “who put their lives on the line.”¹⁹⁴ A substantial set of surveyed teachers stressed the “unfinished” or “ongoing” legacy of the movement even if they did not always agree on what that legacy was. For some, the relevance of the movement was that “it spread” to “a lot of other movements” for “many minority groups.” Some teachers linked the Civil Rights Movement to its proximate historical peers (e.g., feminism, gay liberation, the American Indian Movement, the Chicano movement) while others spoke more broadly of “issues that are still with us” or “messages [that] still ring true today.” Many teachers seemed interested in exploring the question of the mainstream Civil Rights Movement’s relationship to Black Power, if also divided about how best to achieve this. Some expressed a motive to distinguish Black Power from its more “conservative” precursors; others wanted students to share their view that Black Power “undermined” the broader movement; still others described Black Power as an “evolution” of diverse strands within a coalition.¹⁹⁵ At times, the attempt to expand the Civil Rights Movement into an analytical (rather than historical) concept can skew lessons toward abstraction. A Pennsylvania unit that asks students to “identify the tactics used by different minority groups to obtain equal rights [and] evaluate the success of each group in achieving their desired outcomes” sounds more like a civil rights rubric than civil rights history.¹⁹⁶

A smaller subset of teachers put a finer point on the notion of unfinished struggle, stressing that the Civil Rights Movement “did not produce full equality,” “did not solve racism,” and that segregated and unequal conditions continue to characterize contemporary life for many African Americans. Some offered political or structural explanations, citing King’s assassination, a “disillusionment with the increasingly violent protests,” a “conservative backlash,” “neoliberalism,” or “income inequality.”¹⁹⁷ Others shared more fatalistic views; as one Iowa teacher insisted, “fights that were fought . . . will still be going on long after we are all dead.”¹⁹⁸

While the Civil Rights Movement did not rank highly as a challenging topic to teach (only 10 percent ranked it a challenge) the subject was still flagged by more than 100 teachers as a flashpoint for controversy. Those who said they had difficulties cited students’ bad attitudes, parents’ pushback, or an ambient expectation that nothing too disturbing or negative (like lynching or massive resistance) be taught. A Texas teacher supposed that some students who resisted her lesson had learned about the Civil Rights Movement “at home with those who have lived through it.”¹⁹⁹ In contrast to those teachers who said they actively sought connections to the present, several teachers reported that they avoid “reference to present day systemic inequalities” for fear of “lead[ing] to current cultural and political disputes.”²⁰⁰ A handful of teachers specified that it was their discussion of recent protest movements associated with Black Lives Matter that had spurred local criticism. Some teachers found themselves saved by the bell. As one teacher admitted, the question of the era’s consequences and legacies is “usually rushed as its [the] last unit of the year.”²⁰¹

The typical instructional unit on the civil rights era anchors its timeline in leadership and law: Brown v. Board of Education, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In states where legislative events, key figures, and episodes are named and tested by the state education agency, teachers were even more likely to mention these specifics when we asked about key takeaways.²⁰² Beyond this common ground, however, instructional materials pull from a wide spectrum of emphases and examples. Even in heavily standardized Texas, we encountered local variations on key themes, from Cold War contexts to profiles of massive resistance. There are signs that recent historiographic developments and debates—on the social breadth, geographic reach, temporal scope, and political character of civil rights struggles—are finding expression in curricular materials.²⁰³

To varying degrees, recent instructional materials make space for a longer and wider Civil Rights Movement. Some lessons state flatly that “the Civil Rights Movement began in the 1950s,” but even textbooks whose civil rights chapters begin with the Brown case in 1954 will introduce the episode with a prologue of preceding contexts and longer struggles.²⁰⁴ Other books go further, chronicling early 20th-century civil rights organizations, shifting legal strategies, and the labor, migration, and wartime contexts that afforded new venues and constituencies for activism in the 1940s.²⁰⁵ A subset of teachers also voiced their awareness that the Civil Rights Movement “isn’t just a short term thing,” and that they try not to “start with the 1950s as if the movement just suddenly appeared.”²⁰⁶ Even some state standards have expanded the periodization of civil rights, as in Alabama’s two-part treatment, in pre- and post-1950 units, or the Texas-sized “American civil rights movement” lasting “from the late 1800s through the 21st century.”²⁰⁷ This expanded roster of antecedents and temporalities is a welcome development, so long as distinctive contexts, causes, and consequences remain in focus.²⁰⁸

Describing key takeaways on the topic, a predominant chorus of teachers framed their answers against a classically limited cast of characters, stressing that the movement was “more than MLK and Rosa.”²⁰⁹ More teachers made mention of Parks and King in their free responses explaining why they were not the only important figures than to identify that they were important. Multiple teachers stressed that students understand “the collective effort” of “countless activists” and “ordinary citizens” in a “grassroots movement.”²¹⁰ The importance of women’s leadership in the Civil Rights Movement was mentioned by a handful of teachers and is reinforced in some texts.²¹¹ Some districts and teachers linked to teaching materials developed by the nonprofit Teaching Tolerance (now Learning for Justice), which has made an explicit mission of moving teachers away from “a simple story” about the movement.²¹²

Among the stories targeted for complication is the classic historical fight card that pits King against Malcolm X. (The title bout format appears in other topic areas as well: Jefferson v. Hamilton, Garrison v. Douglass, Du Bois v. Washington). A widely used DBQ Project packet titled “Martin Luther King and Malcolm X: Whose Philosophy Made the Most Sense for America in the 1960s?” reveals how curriculum designers have tried to subvert the civic grudge match genre.²¹³ The prompt invites friction, but the selected documents undermine a simple antagonism, bringing the two figures into closer philosophical alignment.²¹⁴ Some teachers seem to have absorbed these messages. As one Iowa teacher wrote, “Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X are not enemies, rather two different approaches to a common problem.”²¹⁵

With schools and students central to the history of midcentury civil rights agitation and massive resistance, some l ask students to imagine themselves in the movement’s pivotal episodes. Opening questions serve as mood setters: “How would you feel if you experienced segregation in the 1950s?” Some role-playing lessons start well, as in a lesson about Ruby Bridges’s experience with school integration in New Orleans, pairing the famous Norman Rockwell painting with a biography. But the lesson merely declares Bridges a hero, missing a chance to explore the history that she made and the context in which she made it. An awkward role-play about the Children’s March culminates with asking students to pretend that they are walking out of school to march for civil rights in 1963 and then to “take out their phones and call or text their parents,” and see whether they would have gotten permission to participate.²¹⁶

Some of the strongest resources that teachers use to enrich their treatment of the Civil Rights Movement are embedded in their local communities. For Alabamans, the topic is a matter of local heritage—“where it all began” as one teacher put it—with prominent institutions offering professional development, field trips, and curriculum resources.²¹⁷ Alabama teachers also noted that local elders are rich resources, even when their stories exposed painful history in their communities and family histories. One teacher who encourages students to “ask their grandparents” about community history, recalled a student discovering a story of a lynched relative.²¹⁸ Another Alabama teacher makes a point to emphasize how her own town “chose to slow school integration.”²¹⁹ Even when local contexts don’t provide referents for the history of segregation, well-designed lessons can use digital collections to portray Jim Crow’s intimate levels of regulation, as in a Smithsonian collection of laws regarding telephone booths, barber shops, dice and card games, and marriage.²²⁰ While a large and mature body of scholarship now traces the history of civil rights mobilizations in the North, curricula we encountered in Northern states appear less likely to root treatment of civil rights in local history.²²¹ In some states, SEAs have partnered with special commissions and local historical associations and museums to develop resources on lesser-known local histories of civil rights agitation.²²² In general, however, the story of the Civil Rights Movement is told with a southern accent.

If better lessons go some way in reenacting the local details of Jim Crow or the contingent dramas of activist strategy, others begin on less solid ground by framing the Civil Rights Movement in timeless moral terms. Asking “Why didn’t all Americans embrace equality?” or asserting that the “moral arc of the United States [was] bending towards perfection, with fits and starts along the way” discourages historical thinking about racial inequality and rights struggles.²²³ If Jim Crow was so obviously incompatible with American ideals, then the movement that accomplished its undoing requires no historical explanation. Prevalent framings of the Civil Rights Movement as an ongoing struggle also invite teachers to use the movement as a measuring rod for events since 1965. A productive prompt in a Texas district—“How did major legislation and litigation change the idea of equality in America?”—is paired with one more susceptible to tendentious speculation: “Was the civil rights movement successful in achieving its intended goals or do we still have work to do?”²²⁴ An Iowa district lesson that asks students to grade issues in American society (“progress made,” “slow-change,” or “needs work”) with reference to the Civil Rights Movement implies that the late 20th century has no history of its own.²²⁵ Over the past 20 years, Civil Rights Movement historiography, robust and contentious, has undergone heavy revision since historians’ early work on the subject. As scholarship has grown in expansiveness and complexity, so too have opportunities for classroom coverage. While a traditional focus on laws and leaders still constitutes the spine of coverage, the era’s civic prominence has actually subjected it to more scrutiny, and thus it is more reflective of recent historiographic developments than many of the other subjects we appraised. Room for improvement clearly remains, most notably in expanding treatment of events outside of the South. With policymakers, administrators, and teachers committed to maintaining the Civil Rights Movement’s high-priority status as required civic knowledge—and despite renewed partisan disputes over the era’s political legacies—there likely will be future opportunities for scholars and educators to expand and complicate treatment of the topic.

Thematic coverage of American history content in instructional materials resists sweeping claims and final verdicts. Classroom educators rely on materials of diverse vintage and mixed quality in multiple formats. Teachers play games, assign readings, show videos, organize research projects, click through slide decks, lead discussions, give lectures, and administer tests. Content shines through with different levels of intensity across these modes of instruction. Even at the level of a single district, teacher, or publisher, the breezy or incomplete treatment of one topic can stand in stark contrast to the depth and sophistication applied to another in the same curriculum. Two things can be true at the same time: the historical content sitting on most teachers’ desktops (whether physical or digital)  steers clear of ideological distortions and reveals teachers’ most urgent needs for higher-quality resources.

 

← Part 3: Curricular Decisions    Conclusion →

---

Notes

1. “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, questions 34, 35, 36, 37. [↩]
2. “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, questions 34, 35, 36, 37. [↩]
3. “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, questions 34, 35, 36, 37.  [↩]
4. “Untold Stories of the American Revolution,” district document, multiple districts, Washington, Suburb: Large (2023). [↩]
5. See discussion in Thomas D. Fallace, “Historiography and Teacher Education: Reflections on an Experimental Course,” History Teacher 42, no. 2 (2009): 205–22. [↩]
6. “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 34. [↩]
7. Thomas Fallace and Johann Neem, “Historiographical Thinking: Towards a New Approach to Preparing History Teachers,” Theory and Research in Social Education 33, no. 3 (2005): 329–46; Agnieszka Aya Marczyk, Lightning Jay, and Abby Reisman, “Entering the Historiographic Problem Space: Scaffolding Student Analysis and Evaluation of Historical Interpretations in Secondary Source Material,” Cognition and Instruction 40, no. 4 (2022): 517–39; Agnieszka Aya Marczyk, Abby Reisman, and Brenda Santos, “Teaching Historiography: Testimony and the Study of the Holocaust,” American Historical Review, 129, no. 1, (March 2024): 175–97. [↩]
8. “Together We Rise: How can we amplify the untold stories of US history?” multidistrict document, Washington, Suburb: Large (2023). [↩]
9. “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, questions 22 and 22E. [↩]
10. “Course Name: US History, 2016–2017,” district document, Iowa, Rural: Fringe (2017), 1. [↩]
11. “How Can Words Lead to Conflict,” teacher document, Washington, City Midsize; “Grade 11 US History,” district document, Texas, Suburb: Large (2022); “Carlisle Indian Industrial School Lesson,” Digital Inquiry Group, https://inquirygroup.org/history-lessons/carlisle-indian-industrial-school; Colorado Department of Education, “Eighth Grade, Standard 1. History,” Colorado Academic Standards: Social Studies (2022), 100. [↩]
12. “Social Studies 6-8 Quarterly Overviews v. 2.10.22, 8th Grade American History, 9–11,” district document, Colorado, City: Large (2022); Assorted Curricular Documents, teacher document, Colorado, Suburb: Large (undated); “Curriculum Map—8th grade, 2022,” district document, Iowa, Rural: Distant (2022); “United States history (11th Grade) Scope and Sequence, 2021,” district document, Washington, City: Midsize (2021), 1–4. [↩]
13. See Sarah B. Shear, Ryan T. Knowles, Gregory J. Soden, and Antonio J. Castro, “Manifesting Destiny: Re/presentations of Indigenous Peoples in K–12 US History Standards,” Theory and Research in Social Education 43, no. 1 (2015): 68–101. [↩]
14. “Curriculum Map—US History 10th grade,” District document, Alabama, Town: Distant (undated). [↩]
15. “Westward Expansion: A New History,” 2nd ed., Choices Curriculum, Brown University, 2021. [↩]
16. TEKS, Elementary Social Studies, Grade 4 (adopted 2022); TEKS, Elementary Social Studies, Grade 7 (adopted 2022). [↩]
17. Grade 4 Virginia Studies, VS.2, History and Social Science Standards of Learning (Board of Education, Commonwealth of Virginia 2023), 12–13. [↩]
18. In the cases of Montana and Washington, content mandates for Native American history actually clash with the otherwise content-free tenor of these “skills-focused” standards. Several state education agencies also have developed curricular resources related to teaching Native history. Examples include: Maine Department of Education, “Wabanaki Cultural Systems & History (MLR Content Standard E),” https://www.maine.gov/doe/learning/content/socialstudies/resources/mainenativestudies/curriculum; Montana Office of Public Instruction, “Indian Education for All,” https://www.maine.gov/doe/learning/content/socialstudies/resources/mainenativestudies/curriculum; Nevada Department of Education, “American Indian Curriculum Guide and Lesson Plans,” https://doe.nv.gov/offices/indian-education/curriculum-guide-and-lesson-plans/; North Dakota Department of Public Instruction, “North Dakota Native American Essential Understandings,” https://www.nd.gov/dpi/education-programs/indian-education/north-dakota-native-american-essential-understandings; Oklahoma State Department of Education, “Oklahoma Indian Tribe Education Guides,” https://sde.ok.gov/tribe-education-resources; Oregon Department of Education, “American Indian/Alaska Native Education,” https://www.oregon.gov/ode/students-and-family/equity/NativeAmericanEducation/Pages/Senate-Bill-13-Tribal-HistoryShared-History.aspx; South Dakota Department of Education, “Oceti Sakowin Essential Understandings and Standards,” https://doe.sd.gov/ContentStandards/documents/18-OSEUs.pdf; Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, “Wisconsin First Nations Education,” https://wisconsinfirstnations.org/. Meredith McCoy presented these resources at the AHA Teacher Institute, “Native Peoples and the Architecture of US History,” July, 24, 2024, https://www.historians.org/event/2024-aha-online-teacher-institute-native-peoples-and-the-architecture-of-us-history/. [↩]
19. Topics with higher rates of reported difficulty were the Early National Period (31 percent) and the Great Recession to the Present Day (24 percent) “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 21, n = 1,516. [↩]
20. “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 22: Suburban Connecticut Teacher; Rural Colorado Teacher. [↩]
21. Iowa Teacher, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 22. [↩]
22. Rural Washington Teacher, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 22. [↩]
23. City Illinois Teacher, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 22. [↩]
24. Suburban Pennsylvania Teacher, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 22. [↩]
25. “13 Colonies Unit Plan.” teacher document, Iowa, Rural: Distant (undated). [↩]
26. Alabama Department of Education, Alabama Course of Studies: Social Studies (2010), 24. [↩]
27. California Social Studies Standards, grade 4, (1998) 14; US History Curriculum Map, “Building the Young Republic.” district document, Illinois, Suburb: Large (2022). For historical work on Indigenous peoples and the environment, see William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983); Lisa Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); Joshua L. Reid, The Sea Is My Country: The Maritime World of the Makahs (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015); Hayley Negrin, “Return to the Yeokanta/River: Powhatan Women and Environmental Treaty Making in Early America,” Environmental History 28, no. 3 (July 2023): 522–53. For scholarly critique and complication of the “ecological Indian,” see Shepard Krech III, The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999) and Michael E. Harkin and David Rich Lewis, eds. Native Americans and the Environment: Perspectives on the Ecological Indian (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007). [↩]
28. TCMPS, “TEKS Resource System,” TEKS Clarification: 8.23D,” multidistrict document, Texas (2014). [↩]
29. Town Texas Teacher, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 22. [↩]
30. “Unit 4: American Revolution,” Yearly Overview and Scope and Sequence 2023–24, district document, Virginia, Suburb: Large (2023). [↩]
31. Alabama Department of Education, Alabama Course of Studies: Social Studies (2010), 63. [↩]
32. See, for example, Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Brian DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the US-Mexican War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); John W. Hall, Uncommon Defense: Indian Allies and the Black Hawk War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Robbie Ethridge, From Chicaza to Chickasaw: The European Invasion and the Transformation of the Mississippian World, 1540–1715 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Kathleen DuVal, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists in the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Michael Witgen, An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Early North America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Colin G. Calloway, New Worlds for All: Indians, Europeans, and the Remaking of Early America, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013); Pekka Hämäläinen, Indigenous Continent (New York: Liveright, 2022); Matthew Kruer, Time of Anarchy: Indigenous Power and the Crisis of Colonialism in Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022); Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023). [↩]
33. A small handful of social studies curriculum coordinators and teachers identified themselves as motivated to “decolonize” or otherwise audit their instructional practices with an eye toward antiracist principles. Interview with social studies administrator (SSA 102), February 16, 2023; Interview with social studies administrator (SSA 917), September 18, 2023; Interview with middle school social studies teacher (MST 425), August 8, 2023. For public-facing statements to this effect, see Denver Public Schools, “Native American Culture & Education,” https://equity.dpsk12.org/native-american-culture-education/; Seattle Public Schools, “Black Studies in SPS” https://www.seattleschools.org/news/black-studies-in-sps/; Chicago Public Schools, “Culturally Responsive, Sustaining Curriculum and Instruction,” cps-ssce-dashboard-staging.herokuapp.com/social-science-k-12/social-science-vision-and-core-areas/culturally-responsive-sustaining-curriculum-instruction/. [↩]
34. For a sample of scholarly debates to this effect, see Devon A. Mihesuah, Natives and Academics: Researching and Writing about American Indians (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998); Susan A. Miller, “Native America Writes Back: The Origin of the Indigenous Paradigm in Historiography,” Wíčazo Ša Review 23 no. 2 (Fall 2008): 9-28; Alyssa Mt. Pleasant, Caroline Wiggington, and Kelly Wisecup, “Materials and Methods in Native American and Indigenous Studies,” Early American Literature 53, no. 2 (2018): 407–44; David J. Silverman, “Living with the Past: Thoughts on Community Collaboration and Difficult History in Native American and Indigenous Studies,” American Historical Review 125, no. 2 (April 2020): 519–27; Jean M. O’Brien, “What Does Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) Do?,” American Historical Review 125, no. 2 (April 2020): 542–45. [↩]
35. For inclusion of land bridge and maritime migrations as competing theories, see James West Davidson and Michael B. Stoff, American History: My World Interactive (Boston: Pearson, 2019), 8; Joyce Appleby, Alan Brinkley, Albert S. Broussard, James M. McPherson, and Donald A. Ritchie, Discovering Our Past: A History of the United States (Columbus, OH: McGraw Hill Education, 2018), 5; Emma J. Lapansky-Werner, Peter B. Levy, Randy Roberts, and Alan Taylor, US History Interactive (Paramus, NJ: Savvas Learning Company, 2022), 4-5. For more deliberate treatment of a “great debate” among scientists about routes and episodes of migration by land, ice, and sea, see Fredrik Hiebert, Peggy Althoff, and Fritz Fischer, US History: American Stories (Chicago: National Geographic Learning, 2017), 4–7. [↩]
36. “Social Science, Grade 7: Native American Identities: Woven Across Time,” district document, Illinois, City: Large (2022). Vagueness about Native American origins is occasionally reinforced by “time immemorial” framings–most prominent in Washington, where it serves as the title for a state-created curriculum. The phrase also appears in state guidance from Alaska, Montana, and Oregon and is currently up for approval in the Illinois legislature. See Illinois HB 1633 (2024). [↩]
37. “Middle School Washington State Tribal History, Since Time Immemorial—Land Based People,” district document, Washington, City: Large (2020). [↩]
38. Minnesota Department of Education, 2021 Minnesota K–12 Academic Standards in Social Studies (Commissioner Approved Draft) (2021). [↩]
39. Civic-sentimental approaches to teaching Native history are not new. For early 19th-century examples, see Carolyn Eastman, A Nation of Speechifiers: Making an American Public after the Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 104–09. [↩]
40. “Warm Up to Social Studies, Grade 7: Part 2,” multidistrict document, Texas (2021); “American Heritage Course/Curriculum Guide,” district document, Iowa, Town: Remote (undated). [↩]
41. “Grade 8 United States History,” district document, Connecticut, Suburb: Large (2023). [↩]
42. “Investigation 2: How Native American Stereotypes Developed Throughout History,” district document, Illinois, City: Large (2022). [↩]
43. “Grade 11 Social Studies,” district document, Illinois, Suburb: Large (undated), 1–6; “Social Science, Grade 7: Native American Identities: Woven Across Time,” district document, Illinois, City: Large (2022). [↩]
44. “Grade 8: Tragedy of the Native,” teacher document, Iowa, Rural: Fringe (undated); “Social Science, Grade 7: Native American Identities: Woven Across Time,” district document, Illinois, City: Large (2022). [↩]
45. Land acknowledgment activities appear in “Indivisible: What Unites Communities?” district document, Washington, Suburb: Large (2021); “Native Land Teacher Guide 2019,” district document, Iowa, City: Small (2019); “Simulation: Create a Land Acknowledgement,” district document, Illinois, City: Large (2022). [↩]
46. “Middle School Washington State Tribal History, Since Time Immemorial—Land Based People,” district document, Washington, City: Large (2020). [↩]
47. “US History 1: The Postwar Boom, Chapter 27,” district document, Illinois, Suburb: Large; “US History Course Outline,” teacher document, Illinois, Suburb: Large; “US History Unit Planner: Freedom and Reform, 1–4,” district document, Illinois, Suburb, Large (undated). [↩]
48. “US History 1 Movements of People, 2–3,” district document, Connecticut, City: Midsize (2018). [↩]
49. TCMPS, Instructional Focus Document, Grade 8 Social Studies, Unit 7, multidistrict document, Texas (undated), 4. [↩]
50. “Northern Plains Treaties: Is a Treaty Intended to Be Forever? National Museum of the American Indian,” teacher document, Iowa, Rural: Fringe (2018). [↩]
51. “8 Social Studies Unit 2, 3–4,7,” district document, Iowa, City-Midsize (undated). [↩]
52. Connecticut Teacher, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 5. [↩]
53. For a contemplation, see Jane Kamensky, “Two Cheers for the Nation: An American Revolution for the Revolting United States,” Reviews in American History 47 no. 3 (September 2019): 308–18. [↩]
54. See H. W. Brands, “Founders Chic,” The Atlantic, September 2003; David Waldstreicher, “Founders Chic as Culture War,” Radical History Review 84 (Fall 2002): 185–94; Ken Owen, “Historians and Hamilton: Founders Chic and the Cult of Personality,” The Junto: A Group Blog on Early American History, April 21, 2016, https://earlyamericanists.com/2016/04/21/historians-and-hamilton-founders-chic-and-the-cult-of-personality/. For a variety of engagements with the Hamilton franchise, see the special issue of Journal of the Early Republic 37, no. 2 (Summer 2017). [↩]
55. See, for example, Dylan Matthews, “Three Reasons the American Revolution Was a Mistake,” Vox, July 2, 2015, https://www.vox.com/2015/7/2/8884885/american-revolution-mistake; Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Letter to My Son,” The Atlantic, July 4, 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07/tanehisi-coates-between-the-world-and-me/397619/; Adam Gopnik, “We Could Have Been Canada: Was the American Revolution Such a Good Idea?,” New Yorker, May 18, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/15/we-could-have-been-canada. [↩]
56. For the original, see “The 1619 Project,” New York Times Magazine, August 18, 2019, https://pulitzercenter.org/sites/default/files/full_issue_of_the_1619_project.pdf. For supportive commentary, see Ibram X. Kendi, “The Hopefulness and Hopelessness of 1619,” The Atlantic, Aug 20, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/historical-significance-1619/596365/; Adam Serwer, “The Fight over the 1619 Project Is Not about the Facts,” The Atlantic, December 23, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/12/historians-clash-1619-project/604093/. [↩]
57. Historians were immediately divided on whether the project’s interpretive flaws were disqualifying or merely distracting. For historians’ public critique of the 1619 Project, see Tom Mackaman, “An interview with historian Gordon Wood on the New York Times’ 1619 Project,” World Socialist Website, November 27, 2019; Tom Mackaman, “An interview with historian James McPherson on the New York Times’ 1619 Project,” World Socialist Website, November 14, 2019; Sean Wilentz, “American Slavery and the Relentlessly Unforeseen,” New York Review, November 19, 2019; Sean Wilentz, “A Matter of Facts,” The Atlantic, January 22, 2020; James Oakes, “What the 1619 Project Got Wrong,” Catalyst. 5, no. 3 (Fall 2021): 8-47. For historians publicly supportive of the 1619 Project, see David Waldstreicher, “The Hidden Stakes of the 1619 Controversy,” Boston Review, January 24, 2020; Woody Holton, “The Declaration of Independence’s Debt to Black America,” Washington Post, July 2, 2021; Ta-Nehisi Coates, Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, and Martha Jones, “We Stand in Solidarity with Nikole Hannah-Jones,” The Root, May 25, 2021. [↩]
58. See, for example, introductory language in state standards for Louisiana, South Dakota, and Virginia. [↩]
59. “Social Studies Standards Map,” AIR, updated June 4, 2024, https://www.air.org/social-studies-standards-map. [↩]
60. iCivics, “Road to the Constitution,” https://www.icivics.org/curriculum/road-constitution. [↩]
61. “Loyalty or Opposition: What Is More Important for Citizenship,” teacher document, Washington, City: Small (undated). [↩]
62. “Boston Tea Party: Activism or Vandalism?,” multiple appearances: district document, Texas, City: Large (undated); district document, Virginia, Suburb, Large (undated). [↩]
63. Diane Hart, et al., History Alive! The United States Through Modern Times (Rancho Cordova, CA: Teachers Curriculum Institute, 2021). [↩]
64. City Washington Teacher, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 22. [↩]
65. Rural Alabama Teacher, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 22. [↩]
66. Suburban Virginia Teacher, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 22. [↩]
67. Suburban Virginia Teacher, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 22. [↩]
68. In K–12 curricula and textbooks, “salutary neglect” remains ubiquitous. For scholarly skepticism, see T. H. Breen,“Ideology and Nationalism on the Eve of the American Revolution: Revisions Once More in Need of Revising,” Journal of American History 84, no. 1 (June 1997): 13–39; Holly Brewer, “The Myth of ‘Salutary Neglect’: Empire and Revolution in the Long Eighteenth Century,” in The Cambridge History of the Age of Atlantic Revolutions, volume 1, The Enlightenment and the British Colonies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023). [↩]
69. These are, of course, no less important to scholarship on the era. See John Murrin, “1776: The Countercyclical Revolution,” in Revolutionary Currents: Nation Building in the Transatlantic, Michael A. Morrison and Melinda Zook, eds. (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), 65–90. [↩]
70. “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 14, quotes from Illinois Teacher, Rural: Distant; Washington Teacher, City: Large; Connecticut Teacher, Rural: Fringe. [↩]
71. These lessons might be seen as the durable legacies of now-classic works: Gordon S. Wood, “Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 23, no. 1 (January 1966): 3–32, and Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967). [↩]
72. “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 14, multiple responses: Rural Illinois Teacher; Rural Illinois Teacher; City Illinois Teacher; City Connecticut Teacher; Suburban Connecticut Teacher; City Pennsylvania Teacher; Suburban Pennsylvania Teacher; Town Pennsylvania Teacher; City Iowa Teacher; Rural Iowa Teacher; Rural Iowa Teacher; City Texas Teacher; Town Texas Teacher; Rural Alabama Teacher; Rural Colorado Teacher; City Virginia Teacher; Rural Virginia Teacher; Rural Virginia Teacher; Rural Washington Teacher. [↩]
73. “Was the American Revolution Avoidable?” (2015), multiple appearances: “United States History 11th: Grade, Unit 1,” district document, Washington, City: Midsize (undated); 6th Grade History Scope and Sequence, Virginia, Suburb: Large (2023); “U.S. History 8th Grade, Unit 2,” Texas: City, Midsize (2021); “Unit Outcomes,” Colorado, Town: Remote (undated); “Yearly Planning Guide,” Texas, City: Large (2021). It should be noted that one of these often-used inquiries contains an erroneous date (a document is dated 1766 when it should be 1776). A teacher who misses this may have students making the wrong argument. [↩]
74. “Historical Scene Investigation: The Boston Massacre,” district document, Texas, City: Large (undated); “Inquiry: Boston Tea Party: Activism or Vandalism?,” 6th Grade History Scope and Sequence, Virginia, Suburb: Large (2023), 4; “Loyalist Lesson Plan,” SHEG, district document, Washington, City: Midsize (undated); “Unit: Revolutionary Era,” Grade 8 American History, district document, Texas, Suburb: Large (2021), 3.; “Primary Source Lesson Plan-Patriots and Tories, “U.S. History 8th Grade, Unit 2,” district document, Texas: City, Midsize (undated), 1; “DBQ Project: Mini-Q: Valley Forge: Would You Have Quit?,” multiple appearances: district document, Colorado, Suburb: Small (undated); Texas, Suburb: Large (undated); teacher document, Iowa, Rural: Distant (undated); Virginia, Suburb: Large (undated); “6th Grade History Scope and Sequence,” Virginia, Suburb: Large (2023). [↩]
75. “The American Revolution: Experiences of Rebellion,” Choices Curriculum, Brown University, 2016, https://www.choices.edu/curriculum-unit/american-revolution-experiences-rebellion/. [↩]
76. iCivics, “Race to Ratify,” (2019), https://www.icivics.org/node/2599424/resource, multiple appearances: district document, Pennsylvania, City: Large (undated); Pennsylvania, Rural: Fringe (undated); Pennsylvania: City: Small (undated). [↩]
77. Town Iowa Teacher, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 14. [↩]
78. “Assessing the Historical Truth behind the Declaration of Independence,” teacher document, Colorado, Suburb: Large (2019). [↩]
79. “How Revolutionary Was the American Revolution,” teacher document, Washington, City: Small (2015). [↩]
80. For “flawed,” “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 14, multiple responses: Town Alabama Teacher; Town Iowa Teacher; Suburban Illinois Teacher; City Virginia Teacher; City Washington Teacher; Town Washington Teacher; Town Washington Teacher. For “imperfect,” Suburban Pennsylvania Teacher; Town Alabama Teacher; Suburban Illinois Teacher; Suburban Virginia Teacher. [↩]
81. “Untold Stories of the Revolution,” district document, Washington, Suburb: Large (2023). [↩]
82. “Unit 3: Lesson 3: Remember the Ladies,” district document, Illinois, City: Large (2022). [↩]
83. “Grade 7 Social Science: Unit 2,” district document, Illinois, City: Large (2022). [↩]
84. Iowa Teacher, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 22. [↩]
85. See Woody Holton, “American Revolution and Early Republic,” in American History Now (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011); Andrew Shankman, ed., The World of the Revolutionary American Republic: Land, Labor, and the Conflict for a Continent (New York: Routledge, 2014); Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), esp. part 1; Alan Taylor, American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750–1804 (New York: W.W. Norton, 2016); Sean Wilentz, No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019); Paul J. Polgar, Standard-Bearers or Equality: America’s First Abolitionist Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019); Gordon S. Wood, Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). [↩]
86. Quote from Suburban Pennsylvania Teacher, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 14; similar sentiments in City Texas Teacher; Suburban Colorado Teacher; Town Iowa Teacher. [↩]
87. City Texas Teacher, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 14. [↩]
88. Suburban Illinois Teacher, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 14. [↩]
89. Rural Virginia Teacher, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 14. [↩]
90. Suburban Illinois Teacher, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 14. [↩]
91. “Yearly Planning Guide 2021–2022,” Sub-Unit Plan 6.1, Overview of Manifest Destiny, 7 & 2, district document, Texas, City: Large (2021). [↩]
92. Over 400 surveyed teachers mentioned Manifest Destiny as a key “takeaway” for students during their study of westward expansion, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 15. [↩]
93. Pennsylvania Teacher, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 15; For historians’ increasing skepticism of the manifest destiny concept, see William Cronon, “Revisiting the Vanishing Frontier: The Legacy of Frederick Jackson Turner,” Western Historical Quarterly 18, no. 2, (April 1987):157–76; Clyde Milner, ed., Major Problems in the History of the American West: Documents and Essays (Lexington, KY: D. C. Heath and Company, 1989); Pekka Hamalainen and Samuel Truett, “On Borderlands,” Journal of American History 98, no. 2 (September 2011): 338–61; Stephen Aron, Frontiers, Borderlands, Wests (American History Now) (Washington, DC: AHA, 2012); Andrew C. Isenberg and Thomas Richards Jr., “Alternative Wests: Rethinking Manifest Destiny,” Pacific Historical Review 86, no. 1 (February 2017): 4–17; Daniel J. Burge, A Failed Vision of Empire: The Collapse of Manifest Destiny, 1845–1872 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022); Elliott West, Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2023). [↩]
94. One-word takeaway from Colorado Teacher, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 15. [↩]
95. Alabama Teacher, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 15. [↩]
96. Colorado Teacher, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 15. [↩]
97. “Westward Expansion: A New History,” 2nd ed., Choices Curriculum, Brown University, 2021. Historians actively debate the utility of settler-colonial theory in American history. See Samuel Truett, “Settler Colonialism and the Borderlands of Early America,” William and Mary Quarterly 76, no. 3 (July 2019): 435–42; Jeffrey Ostler and Nancy Shoemaker, “Settler Colonialism in Early American History: Introduction,” William and Mary Quarterly 76, no. 3 (July 2019): 361–68; Rachel St. John, “Reconsidering Expansion,” American Historian, no. 40 (Summer 2024): 30-35, https://www.oah.org/tah/expansion/reconsidering-expansion/. [↩]
98. Illinois Teacher, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 15; “United States History Unit 2, 6,” district document, Iowa, City-Midsize (undated). [↩]
99. “Curricular Documents, Legislation for Westward Expansion,” district document, Washington, City: Midsize (undated). Mentioned by 40 respondents as a takeaway, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 15. [↩]
100. Colorado Teacher, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 15. [↩]
101. “US History Course Outline, 3,” district document, Illinois, Suburb: Large (undated). “Native Americans of the Southeast,” teacher documents, Alabama, City: Midsize (undated). “Unit 3 Map,” district document, Illinois, Rural: Distant (undated). [↩]
102. Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005); John Bowes, Land Too Good for Indians: Northern Indian Removal (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017); Christoper D. Haveman, Rivers of Sand: Creek Indian Emigration, Relocation, and Ethnic Cleansing in the American South (Norman: University of Nebraska Press, 2020); Claudio Saunt, Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory (New York: W.W. Norton, 2021). [↩]
103. “Road to the Civil War Unit Plan,” district document, Iowa, Rural: Distant (undated). [↩]
104. New York State Department of Education, New York State, Grades 9–12, Social Studies Framework (2014), 36. [↩]
105. Stacey L. Smith, Freedom’s Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013). [↩]
106. “Crash Course US History: Westward Expansion,” Crash Course US History, accessed May 14, 2024, https://thecrashcourse.com/courses/westward-expansion-crash-course-us-history-24/. [↩]
107. Colorado Teacher, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 15.  [↩]
108. “Eighth Grade Social Studies, 2022–2023, Unit Plan 4, An Expanding Nation, Inquiry Kit: Full Steam Ahead! The Tracks of Transformation!” district document, Colorado, Suburb: Small (2022). [↩]
109. State of Rhode Island Department of Education, Rhode Island Social Studies Standards (2023), 250. [↩]
110. “8.6 Westward Expansion, Human and Environmental Interactions, 2,” district document, Texas, City: Midsize (undated). [↩]
111. New York State Department of Education, New York State, Grades K–8, Social Studies Framework (2016), 55. [↩]
112. Michigan Department of Education, Michigan K–12 Standards: Social Studies (2019), 80. [↩]
113. Colorado Department of Education, Colorado Academic Standards: Social Studies (2020), 89. [↩]
114. Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011); John Mack Faragher, Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). [↩]
115. “Eighth Grade Social Studies, 2022–2023, Unit Plan 4, An Expanding Nation, Inquiry Kit: Full Steam Ahead! The Tracks of Transformation!” district document, Colorado, Suburb: Small (2022). [↩]
116. Washington Teacher, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 15. [↩]
117. “Westward Expansion: A New History,” 2nd ed., Choices Curriculum, Brown University (2021). [↩]
118. “8th Grade, Unit 7: Westward Expansion, 2,” district document, Texas, City: Large (2022). [↩]
119. Andrew C. Isenberg and Thomas Richards Jr., “Alternative Wests: Rethinking Manifest Destiny,” Pacific Historical Review 86, no. 1 (February 2017): 4–17. [↩]
120. “US History 11, Unit 2, Growth and Industry, 5,” district document, Texas, City: Midsize, (2015). [↩]
121. “Social Studies Curriculum Guide, USHII, Westward Expansion, 1,” district document, Virginia, City: Small, (undated); “Oregon Trail Simulation,” teacher document, Illinois, Suburb: Large (undated). [↩]
122. “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 23. [↩]
123. For accounts of unreconstructed US history, see Cory Turner, “Why Schools Fail to Teach Slavery’s ‘Hard History,’” All Things Considered, National Public Radio, February 4, 2018, https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2018/02/04/582468315/why-schools-fail-to-teach-slaverys-hard-history; Nikita Stewart, “Why Can’t We Teach This?” New York Times Magazine, August 18, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/19/magazine/slavery-american-schools.html; Joe Heim, “What Do Students Learn About Slavery? It Depends Where They Live,” Washington Post, August 28, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/08/28/what-do-students-learn-about-slavery-it-depends-where-they-live/. [↩]
124. City Illinois Teacher, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 24. [↩]
125. “Yearly Planning Guide 2021–2022, Sub-Unit Plan 7.3, Sectionalism and Causes of the Civil War,” district document, Texas, City: Large (2021), 9. Many teachers can make it clear the extent to which the Civil War was about slavery and the states’ rights to determine their policy regarding slavery. [↩]
126. “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, questions 21 and 38. For question 21, responses were divided among a chronological list of 27 content areas, and respondents were allowed to select whether they considered the area to be high, mid, low, or no priority. Question 38 asked respondents to describe objections they had personally experienced through an open response form. [↩]
127. “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 21. [↩]
128. “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 22. [↩]
129. “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 38. [↩]
130. See Part 3, “Vibes and Pressures,” for further discussion. [↩]
131. “What Caused the Civil War?” (Evanston, IL: DBQ Project, 2008). [↩]
132. Sinha, The Slave’s Cause. [↩]
133. Suburban Illinois Teacher, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 24; Interview with high school social studies teacher (HST 201), May 16, 2023; “United States I: Chapter 11 Unit Plan,” district document, Illinois, Suburb: Large (2014). [↩]
134. “Grade 8 Social Studies Curriculum,” district document, Connecticut, Suburb: Large (2016). [↩]
135. See, for example, “The Worlds of North and South” and “African Americans in the Mid-1800s” in Hart, et al., History Alive! The United State Through Modern Times; “Slavery and Resistance” and “Slavery and Racism” in Hiebert, Althoff, and Fischer, American Stories. [↩]
136. “Common Assessment, Pacing, & Standards for US History, ‘United States History Theme 1: The Civil War and Reconstruction,’” district document, Illinois, City: Midsize (2021). [↩]
137. Urban Pennsylvania Teacher, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 17. [↩]
138. “Grade 10 US History Curriculum Guide, Unit 10: Reconstruction, student packet,” teacher document, Alabama, City: Small (undated). [↩]
139. “C3 materials,” district document, Illinois, Suburb: Large (undated). [↩]
140. “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, questions 16 and 17. [↩]
141. Louisiana Department of Education, Louisiana Social Studies Standards (2022), 49; “Reconstruction and the West,” district document, Iowa, City: Small (undated); State of Rhode Island Department of Education, Rhode Island Social Studies Standards (2023), 133. In this case, nurse Katherine Prescott Wormeley and abolitionist Julia Ward Howe are included. [↩]
142. Barbara J. Fields, “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America,” New Left Review 1, no. 181 (1990): 95–118; Rebecca Anne Goetz, “Rethinking the ‘Unthinking Decision’: Old Questions and New Problems in the History of Slavery and Race in the Colonial South,” Journal of Southern History 75, no. 3 (2009): 599–612; Jason Eden, “Answers to the Question: ‘Who Developed Race?’” The History Teacher 44, no. 2 (2011): 169–77. [↩]
143. “The Civil War and the Meaning of Liberty,” 1st ed., Choices Curriculum, Brown University, 2019. [↩]
144. See Edmund Morgan, American Slavery American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W.W. Norton, 1975); David Brion Davis, “American Slavery and the American Revolution,” in Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution, Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman, eds. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1983); Edward E. Baptist and Stephanie M. H. Camp, eds., New Studies in the History of American Slavery (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006). [↩]
145. “Stamped Unit” teacher document, Connecticut, Suburb: Midsize (2023). [↩]
146. “Atlantic Slave War: Investigating the Origins and History Unit by African American History,” district document, Pennsylvania, City: Large (2021). [↩]
147. “Sheff v O’Neill,” teacher document, Connecticut, Suburb: Midsize (2023). “Unit Development Project: Reconstruction and Racial Segregation,” district document, Virginia, Suburb: Small (undated); “Civil War Lesson Plans,” district document, Washington, Suburb: Large (undated). [↩]
148. “Lesson plans grade 7,” teacher document, Iowa, Rural: Fringe (undated). [↩]
149. Peter Coclanis, Review of Inventing the Cotton Gin: Machine and Myth in Antebellum America by Angela Lakwete, Technology and Culture 45, no. 4, (2004): 834–35; Lapansky-Werner, et al., US History Interactive, 198; Hart, et al., History Alive! The United States Through Modern Times, 236; “Westward Expansion: UBD,” district document, Virginia, Suburb: Small (2022). [↩]
150. “Curriculum Map—US History 10th grade,” district document, Alabama, Town: Distant (undated). [↩]
151. “8th Grade U.S. History, Unit 16: Reconstruction, 1,” district document, Texas, Suburb: Large (2023); Lapansky-Werner et al., US History Interactive, 350; Hart et al., History Alive!, 309. [↩]
152. “Ch 15 causes of the CW, and Ch 16 and 17 CW part I and II,” teacher document, Texas, Suburb: Midsize (undated). [↩]
153. “Crash Course US History Battles of the Civil War,” US History Crash Course, accessed May 13, 2024, https://thecrashcourse.com/courses/battles-of-the-civil-war-crash-course-us-history-19/. [↩]
154. Interview with middle school social studies teacher (MST 310), May 18, 2023; Interview with high school social studies teacher (HST 109), September 15, 2023. [↩]
155. Gary W. Gallagher and Kathryn Shively Meier, “Coming to Terms with Civil War Military History,” Journal of the Civil War Era 4, no. 4 (2014): 487–508; Manisha Sinha, “Architects of Their Own Liberation: African Americans, Emancipation, and the Civil War,” OAH Magazine of History 27, no. 2 (2013): 5–10. [↩]
156. The threads interwoven in “Industry, Capital, and Labor” present a particular challenge, as themes stretch past 1914 or 1920 (commonly cited endpoints of the Progressive Era), and into the New Deal and the beginning of World War II. Our research focused on coverage of these themes during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era while looking for threads of continuity during the 1920s, Great Depression, and New Deal. [↩]
157. Arizona Department of Education, Arizona History and Social Studies Standards, 47; “SMS Social Studies Weekly Lesson Plans,” teacher document, Alabama, Town: Distant (2021); “2022–2023 Curriculum Guide,” district document, Colorado, City: Midsize (undated). [↩]
158. “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 21. [↩]
159. Suburban Illinois Teacher, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 22J. [↩]
160. Suburban Connecticut Teacher, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 22J. [↩]
161. Virginia City Teacher, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 22J. [↩]
162. The topics earned 14 percent and 57 percent, respectively. “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire 2023, questions 22J and 22L. [↩]
163. Texas City Teacher, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 22L. [↩]
164. Suburban Alabama Teacher, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 22L. [↩]
165. Suburban Virginia Teacher, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire (2023), question 18. Some standards and districts cover the Gilded Age and Progressive Era in middle school, but the frequency and extent of this coverage is unclear. In interviews, teachers consistently noted that first-half classes in the middle grades encounter substantial barriers to make it to Reconstruction by year’s end, from which we can reasonably extrapolate that Gilded Age coverage before high school is even rarer. [↩]
166. Arizona Department of Education, Arizona History and Social Studies Standards, 47; “SMS Social Studies Weekly Lesson Plans,” teacher document, Alabama, Town: Distant (2021); “2022–2023 Curriculum Guide,” district document, Colorado, City: Midsize (undated). [↩]
167. For evolution and debate over key terms and efforts at synthesis, see Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (New York: Vintage, 1955); Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1966); Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982); Richard L. McCormick, The Party Period and Public Policy: American Politics from the Age of Jackson to the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Nell Irvin Painter, Standing at Armageddon: The United States, 1877–1919 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988); Sean Dennis Cashman, America in the Gilded Age: From the Death of Lincoln to the Rise of Theodore Roosevelt (New York: New York University Press, 1984); John Milton Cooper, Pivotal Decades: The United States, 1900–1920 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990); Olivier Zunz, Making America Corporate, 1870–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Leon Fink, In Search of the Working Class: Essays in American Labor History and Political Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Rebecca Edwards, New Spirits: America in the Gilded Age, 1865–1905 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (New York: Harper, 2009); Robert D. Johnston, “The Possibilities of Politics: Democracy in America, 1877 to 1917,” in American History Now, Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr, eds. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), 98–124; Sven Beckert, “History of American Capitalism,” in American History Now, Foner and McGirr, eds., 314–35. [↩]
168. “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire (2023), question 18: Suburban Illinois Teacher; Suburban Washington Teacher. [↩]
169. “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire (2023), question 18, multiple responses: Rural Texas Teacher; Urban Texas Teacher; Suburban Connecticut Teacher; Suburban Illinois Teacher. [↩]
170. “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire (2023), question 18, multiple responses: Suburban Alabama Teacher; Rural Alabama Teacher; Rural Iowa Teacher; Suburban Illinois Teacher; Suburban Pennsylvania Teacher. [↩]
171. “Andrew Carnegie,” multidistrict document, Texas (2020). [↩]
172. Rural Texas Teacher, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire (2023), question 18. [↩]
173. “US History (8th Grade) Unit 5,” district document, Texas, City: Midsize (2021); “First Semester Priority Standards and Common Assessments,” district document, Iowa, City: Small (undated); “Unit Template,” district document, Iowa, Rural: Distant (undated); “Industrialization, Progressivism & Immigration Unit Test,” district document, Colorado, Suburban: Large (undated). [↩]
174. For the idea that “there are no masses, but only ways of seeing people as masses,” see Raymond Williams, The Raymond Williams Reader, ed. John Higgins (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001), 18. [↩]
175. The sociological approach takes for granted the existence of these categories, when in fact some were emergent or reformed in this period. For historical accounts, see Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City, 1870–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Stuart Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Burton Bledstein, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the Development of Higher Education in America (New York: W.W. Norton, 1976). [↩]
176. Arizona Department of Education, Arizona History and Social Science Standards (2019), 47. [↩]
177. Lapansky-Werner, et al., US History Interactive, 411, 372; “Unit 2 Planner,” district document, Connecticut, City: Midsize (2018); “Unit 2,” district document, Washington, City: Midsize (undated). [↩]
178. USH-2.2–2.4, Mississippi College-and-Career-Readiness Standards for the Social Studies (2022), 93. [↩]
179. “US History Pt 1 BOE Curriculum Guide 22–23,” district document, Colorado, City: Midsize (2022); Rural Colorado Teacher, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire (2023), question 18. [↩]
180. “Grade 7 Social Studies Curriculum Map,” district document, Pennsylvania, Suburb: Large (undated); “Avondale Mills: A Change of Life for Alabamians,” Alabama Learning Exchange, Learning Resources, Social Studies, Grade 6 (2022); “Stamped Unit,” teacher document, Connecticut, Suburb: Midsize (2023). [↩]
181. “US History (Full Year—Revised),” district document, Connecticut, Suburban: Large (2023). [↩]
182. “United States History Grade 11,” district document, Connecticut, Suburban: Large (2017); “9th Grade US History II,” district document, Pennsylvania, Suburban: Large (2021). [↩]
183. “Unit 2 Resource Packets,” district document, Pennsylvania, Suburb: Large (undated). [↩]
184. “Progressive Era Unit Calendar,” district document, Virginia, Suburb: Small (2022). [↩]
185. Fredrik Hiebert, Peggy Altoff, and Fritz Fischer, America Through the Lens: U.S. History, 1877 to Present (Mason, OH: National Geographic Learning/Cengage, 2023), 159. [↩]
186. Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876–1917 (New York: Macmillan Publishers, 2001); Thomas Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). [↩]
187. For extended (and critical) discussion of the civic weight and political purposes placed on the era, see Peniel E. Joseph, “Waiting till the Midnight Hour: Reconceptualizing the Heroic Period of the Civil Rights Movement, 1954–1965,” Souls 2, no. 2, (Spring 2000): 6–17; Risa L. Goluboff, “The Lost Promise of Civil Rights,” Historically Speaking 8, no. 6 (July/August 2007): 33–36; Jeanne Theoharis, A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History (Boston: Beacon Press, 2018); Jana Weiss, “Remember, Celebrate, and Forget? Martin Luther King Day and the Pitfalls of Civil Religion,” Journal of American Studies 53, no. 2 (May 2019): 428–48. [↩]
188. See Hilary Moss, Schooling Citizens: The Struggle for African American Education in Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Audrey Thomas McCluskey, A Forgotten Sisterhood: Pioneering Black Women Educators and Activists in the Jim Crow South (Lanham, MA: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014); Jarvis Givens, Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching (Cambrdge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2023). On local reform efforts in the 1930s and 1940s, see Zoe Burkholder, “‘Education for Citizenship in a Bi-Racial Civilization’: Black Teachers and the Social Construction of Race, 1929–1954,” Journal of Social History 46, no. 2 (Winter 2012): 335–63; Ian Rocksborough Smith, Black Public History in Chicago: Civil Rights Activism from World War II into the Cold War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018), 15–48; Ashley D. Dennis, “The Intellectual Emancipation of the Negro: Madeline Morgan and the Mandatory Black History Curriculum in Chicago during World War II,” History of Education Quarterly 62, no. 2 (April 2022): 136–60; Michael Hines, A Worthy Piece of Work: The Untold Story of Madeline Morgan and the Fight for Black History in Schools (Boston: Beacon Press, 2022). [↩]
189. For the wave of Black history mandates and recommendations (some from state legislatures, some from state boards of education), see Rose Marie Walker, “Black Studies in Schools: A Review of Current Policies and Programs,” Education U.S.A. Special Report (Washington, DC: National School Public Relations Associations, 1969). Mandates tracked were California (1965), Oklahoma (1965), Michigan (1966), Illinois (1967), New Jersey (1967), Kentucky (1968), Pennsylvania (1968), Nevada (1968), Rhode Island (1968), Nebraska (1969), Maryland (1968), and Connecticut (1969). Walker identified prohibitions on discriminatory depictions in California (1961) and Connecticut (1969). For recent surveys of black history mandates and initiatives, see LaGarrett King, “The Status of Black History in US Schools and Society,” Social Education 81, no. 1 (2017): 14–18. [↩]
190. See Rickford, We Are an African People; Todd-Breland, A Political Education. [↩]
191. For more analysis, see Denise M. Bostdorff and Steven R. Goldzwig, “History, Collective Memory, and the Appropriation of Martin Luther King, Jr.: Reagan’s Rhetorical Legacy,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 35, no. 4 (December 2005): 661-90. [↩]
192. See Part 2, “State Legislation,” for further discussion. [↩]
193. See New York SB 7765 (1993). [↩]
194. On taking rights for granted, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 19, multiple responses: City Alabama Teacher; City Colorado Teacher; Suburban Illinois Teacher; Suburban Illinois Teacher; Rural Illinois Teacher; Rural Pennsylvania Teacher; Suburban Virginia Teacher; Suburban Washington Teacher. On sacrifice, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 19, multiple responses: Suburban Washington Teacher; Suburban Washington Teacher; Suburban Washington Teacher; City Alabama Teacher; City Alabama Teacher; Suburban Alabama Teacher; Suburban Alabama Teacher; Rural Alabama Teacher; Suburban Iowa Teacher; Town Iowa Teacher; Rural Iowa Teacher. [↩]
195. “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 19, multiple responses: Town Alabama Teacher; City Illinois Teacher; Suburban Virginia Teacher; City Washington Teacher. [↩]
196. “11th Grade Contemporary US and World History,” School Document, Pennsylvania, Suburb: Large (2021). [↩]
197. “Curriculum Map—US History 10th Grade,” district document, Alabama, Town: Distant, (undated); “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 19, multiple responses: Suburban Washington Teacher; City Colorado Teacher; Suburban Pennsylvania Teacher. [↩]
198. Town Iowa Teacher, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 19. [↩]
199. Rural Texas Teacher, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 22. [↩]
200. “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 22: Rural Texas Teacher; Suburban Texas Teacher. [↩]
201. Town Iowa Teacher, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 19. [↩]
202. Responses from Texas teachers were particularly aligned in naming the same set of persons, events, and concepts. [↩]
203. For successive overviews of civil rights historiography, see Adam Fairclough, “Historians and the Civil Rights Movement,” Journal of American Studies 24, no. 3 (December 1990): 387–98; Steven F. Lawson, “Freedom Then, Freedom Now: The Historiography of the Civil Rights Movement,” American Historical Review 96, no. 2 (April 1991): 456–71; Thomas C. Holt, “African-American History” in The New American History, ed. Eric Foner (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997); Danielle L. Maguire and John Dittmer, Freedom Rights: New Perspectives on the Civil Rights Movement (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2011); Emilye Crosby, ed., Civil Rights History from the Ground Up: Local Struggles, a National Movement (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011); Thomas C. Holt. The Movement: The African American Struggle for Civil Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). On longer periodizations, see Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2005); Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, “The Long Civil Rights Movement and the Political Uses of the Past,” Journal of American History 91, no. 4 (2005): 1233–63; Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Courage to Dissent: Atlanta and the Long History of the Civil Rights Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Dylan Penningroth, Before the Movement: The Hidden History of Black Civil Rights (New York: Liveright, 2023). On continuities with Black Power, see Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt (New York: New York University Press, 2009); Peniel E. Joseph, ed. The Black Power Movement: Rethinking the Civil Rights–Black Power Era (London: Routledge, 2013). [↩]
204. “US History, Unit 9: Civil Rights Movement,” Texas, Suburban: Large (2023); HMH Social Studies, American History, student edition (Houghton-Mifflin Harcourt, 2018), 717–19. [↩]
205. See Lapansky-Werner et al., US History Interactive, 487–93; 597–604; 713–18; 806–54. [↩]
206. Rural Iowa Teacher, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 19. [↩]
207. Alabama Department of Education, Alabama Course of Study: Social Studies, 2010, 35, 50; Texas Education Agency, Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills: United States History Studies Since 1877, 2018, c, 9, A. [↩]
208. Any usable timeline must attend to the social and political realignments brought on by migration, depression, war, urbanization, education, and technology, and distinguish each generation of advocates from the next in terms of philosophy, strategy, and opportunity for success. For a careful account of the connections and disjunctures between early 20th-century rehearsals of civil rights tactics and midcentury successes, see Thomas C. Holt, The Civil Rights Movement: A Brief Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023). For more direct skepticism of the “Long Movement,” see Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang, “The ‘Long Movement’ as Vampire: Temporal and Spatial Fallacies in Recent Black Freedom Studies,” Journal of African American History 92, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 265–88. [↩]
209. Responses of this kind were widespread. AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 19, multiple responses: City Alabama Teacher; City Alabama Teacher; City Alabama Teacher; Rural Alabama Teacher; City Iowa Teacher; City Iowa Teacher; Rural Iowa Teacher; Rural Iowa Teacher; Rural Iowa Teacher; Rural Iowa Teacher, City Illinois Teacher; City Illinois Teacher; Suburban Illinois Teacher; Suburban Illinois Teacher; Town Illinois Teacher; Rural Illinois Teacher; City Pennsylvania Teacher; Suburban Pennsylvania Teacher; Suburban Pennsylvania Teacher; Suburban Texas Teacher City Texas Teacher; City Virginia Teacher; Suburban Virginia Teacher; Suburban Virginia Teacher; Rural Virginia Teacher; City Colorado Teacher; Suburban Colorado Teacher; City Connecticut Teacher; City Connecticut Teacher; Suburban Connecticut Teacher; Suburban Connecticut Teacher. [↩]
210. “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 19, multiple responses: Town Iowa Teacher; Illinois Suburban Teacher; Rural Illinois Teacher; Suburban Pennsylvania Teacher; Rural Texas Teacher; City Texas Teacher. [↩]
211. “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 19, multiple responses; Town Texas Teacher; Suburban Texas Teacher; City Virginia Teacher; Suburban Washington Teacher. “Women Take a Stand” in Hiebert, Altoff, and Fischer, America Through the Lens: US History, 1877–Present, 554–57. [↩]
212. For publications reinforcing the group’s “five essentials,” see Sara Bullard, ed., Free at Last: A History of the Civil Rights Movement and Those Who Died in the Struggle (Montgomery, AL: Southern Poverty Law Center, 1989); Maureen Costello, ed., The March Continues: Five Essential Practices for Teaching the Civil Rights Movement (Montgomery, AL: Teaching Tolerance, 2014); Teaching Tolerance, Civil Rights Done Right: A Tool for Teaching the Movement (Montgomery, AL: Teaching Tolerance, 2016); Learning for Justice, Teaching the Movement: A Framework for Teaching the Black Freedom Struggle (Montgomery, AL: Southern Poverty Law Center, 2023). [↩]
213. “Martin Luther King and Malcolm X: Whose Philosophy Made the Most Sense for America in the 1960s?” The DBQ Project (2008), multiple appearances. [↩]
214. “Martin Luther King and Malcolm X: Whose Philosophy Made the Most Sense for America in the 1960s?” In historiography, see Peniel E. Joseph, The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. (New York: Basic Books, 2020). [↩]
215. City Iowa Teacher, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 19. [↩]
216. “1963—Where Would I Be?,” multidistrict document, Alabama (undated). [↩]
217. The civil rights museums in Montgomery and Birmingham, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, and the Alabama History Institute were all mentioned as popular destinations. Interview with high school social studies teacher (HST 105), September 5, 2023; Interview with high school social studies teacher (HST 108), September 14, 2023; Interview with social studies administrator (SSA 1), December 22, 2022. Quote from Rural Alabama Teacher, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 19. [↩]
218. Town Alabama Teacher, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 14. [↩]
219. “Choose the Era,” teacher document, Connecticut, Suburb: Midsize (2023). [↩]
220. “Jim Crow Lesson,” teacher document, Connecticut, Suburb: Midsize (undated). See “Separate is Not Equal: Brown v. Board of Education: Resources,” Smithsonian National Museum of American History, https://americanhistory.si.edu/brown/resources/teachers-guide.html. [↩]
221. For civil rights in the North, see Matthew Lassiter and Joseph Crespino, eds., The Myth of Southern Exceptionalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Matthew Countryman, Up South: Civil Rights and Black Power in Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Thomas Sugrue, Sweet Land of Liberty: The Forgotten Struggle for Civil Rights in the North (New York: Random House, 2008); Jeanne Theoharis and Komozi Woodard, eds., Freedom North: Black Freedom Struggles Outside the South, 1940–1980 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Mark Brilliant, The Color of America Has Changed: How Racial Diversity Shaped Civil Rights Reform in California, 1941–1978 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). [↩]
222. In Iowa, for example, see “Iowa Civil Rights Toolkit,” Iowa Civil Rights Commission, district document (state-provided), Iowa, City: Small (2015). [↩]
223. “Choose the Era,” teacher document, Connecticut, Suburb: Midsize (2023); Town Connecticut Teacher, “Survey of US History Teachers,” AHA/NORC questionnaire, 2023, question 19. [↩]
224. “US History, Unit 9: Civil Rights Movement,” district document, Texas, Suburban: Large (2023). [↩]
225. “Civil Rights Progress Chart,” district document, Iowa, City: Small (undated). [↩]