History in the News

The Controversy over the Advanced Placement U.S. History Standards 

Each year, nearly half a million high school students take the Advanced Placement exam, hoping to earn college credit.

In early 2015, the College Board unveiled a redesign of the course that is meant to prepare AP teachers and their students for the exam. The redesign prompted condemnation from critics. The Republican National Committee passed a resolution that called the framework “radically revisionist.” Policymakers in several states—including Oklahoma, Georgia, Colorado and Texas—introduced proposals hoping to force a revision.

Among the criticisms:

• That the framework failed to introduce students to the major individuals, ideas, and seminal documents that guided the nation through its history.
• That the framework presented an unbalanced and biased curriculum that offered an excessively negative portrait of American history.

Specific examples included the statement that the nation’s founders believed in “white superiority,” that white Southerners had “pride in the institution of slavery,” and that former President Ronald Reagan was “bellicose.”

In response to its critics, the College Board released a new, new framework for AP U.S. History that sought to address the criticisms. The section on World War II, for example, now stated that Americans saw the war as a fight for freedom and against fascism; the earlier version focused on Japanese internment camps and the atomic bombs, and had failed to mention the Holocaust.

The following text excerpts document the debate over the AP U.S. History standards and illustrate the way that the teaching of U.S. History has become a political battleground. These texts also show how even the revised standards continue to provoke controversy.

An Open Letter from Scholars Concerned About Advanced Placement History

We wish to express our opposition to these modifications. The College Board’s 2014 Advanced Placement Examination shortchanges students by imposing on them an arid, fragmentary, and misleading account of American history. We favor instead a robust, vivid, and content-rich account of our unfolding national drama, warts and all, a history that is alert to all the ways we have disagreed and fallen short of our ideals, while emphasizing the ways that we remain one nation with common ideals and a shared story…

Educators and the public have been willing to trust the College Board to strike a sensible balance among different approaches to the American past. Rather than issuing detailed guidelines, the College Board has in the past furnished a brief topical outline for teachers, leaving them free to choose what to emphasize. In addition, the previous AP U.S. History course featured a strong insistence on content, i.e., on the students’ acquisition of extensive factual knowledge of American history.

But with the new 2014 framework, the College Board has put forward a lengthy 134-page document which repudiates that earlier approach, centralizes control, deemphasizes content, and promotes a particular interpretation of American history. This interpretation downplays American citizenship and American world leadership in favor of a more global and transnational perspective. The College Board has long enjoyed an effective monopoly on advanced placement testing. The changes made in the new framework expose the danger in such a monopoly. The result smacks of an “official” account of the American past. Local, state, and federal policymakers may need to explore competitive alternatives to the College Board’s current domination of advanced-placement testing.

The new framework is organized around such abstractions as “identity,” “peopling,” “work, exchange, and technology,” and “human geography” while downplaying essential subjects, such as the sources, meaning, and development of America’s ideals and political institutions, notably the Constitution. Elections, wars, diplomacy, inventions, discoveries—all these formerly central subjects tend to dissolve into the vagaries of identity-group conflict. The new framework scrubs away all traces of what used to be the chief glory of historical writing—vivid and compelling narrative—and reduces history to a bloodless interplay of abstract and impersonal forces. Gone is the idea that history should provide a fund of compelling stories about exemplary people and events. No longer will students hear about America as a dynamic and exemplary nation, flawed in many respects, but whose citizens have striven through the years toward the more perfect realization of its professed ideals. The new version of the test will effectively marginalize important ways of teaching about the American past, and force American high schools to teach U.S. history from a perspective that self-consciously seeks to de-center American history and subordinate it to a global and heavily social-scientific perspective… 

Revised AP U.S. History Standards Will Emphasize American Exceptionalism

History News Network, July 29, 2015 
http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/160121#sthash.fdHC4Hpg.dpuf

The company behind Advanced Placement courses for U.S. high school students will release a revision to the standards for AP U.S. history on Thursday morning, after significant pushback from conservatives who claimed the redesigned course framework, released last year, painted American history in too negative a light.

The new framework significantly pares down last year’s framework, simplifying and condensing the course’s Thematic Learning Objectives from 50 to 19, according to an official at the College Board, the nonprofit organization that administers AP exams. In the process, a new section on the concept of “American exceptionalism” has been added. Some names that were omitted from last year’s framework, such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and John Adams, have been added—a key sticking point for critics of the prior document, who objected to Founding Fathers being omitted and negative aspects in American history being more emphasized, they claimed, than positive periods.

Left and Right May Not Be Happy with the New AP Standards. Here’s Why You Should Be

By Jeremy Stern, History News Network, August 14, 2015
http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/160264#sthash.srpLPn1d.dpuf

The AP US History framework (APUSH) that took effect in 2014 aroused a firestorm of controversy and criticism…. Many such critics failed to grasp the actual purpose of the document: it is not a comprehensive curriculum for APUSH classrooms (let alone an imposed mandate for all high school students), but rather a guide to the content that would appear on the redesigned APUSH exam….

Nonetheless, there were legitimate concerns. While the concept and many parts of the content were sound, the framework too often took a tendentious and judgmental approach to history, appearing to urge condemnation of the past for its failure to live up to present-day moral standards. Such an approach – ignoring historical context in favor of current ideological and political priorities – is presentism, not history.

The 2014 version, for example, repeatedly singled out the British North American colonies as uniquely intolerant, violent, and oppressive (unfavorably comparing them with the frequently brutal Spanish empire). In the 2015 version, slavery and violence against Native Americans are not “whitewashed,” but are put into wider historical context. The Atlantic slave trade, discussed in 2014 almost uniquely in terms of British North America, in fact predated those colonies by a century, and the vast majority of slaves actually went to the Caribbean and Brazil; also, powerful African states captured and sold virtually all the slaves bought by European traders on the African coast – all points the revision correctly notes, while still emphasizing the colonies’ extensive reliance on slavery. The complexities of inter-Indian warfare and native-colonial alliances are also acknowledged, without downplaying the tragic costs of European colonization for native peoples.

The historically crucial rise of relatively egalitarian societies and representative political institutions in the colonies—all but ignored in the 2014 version—is now given due weight. What was egalitarian by 17th century standards is of course absurdly limited to modern eyes, denying even basic rights to women and non-whites – but one must understand why and how such societies and institutions were exceptional for their time to understand the foundation on which later expansions of freedom were laboriously built. Likewise, the Jacksonian rise of near-universal white male suffrage, an extraordinarily radical concept in its day (barely mentioned in the 2014 version) is now properly described in the revision.

The benefits and costs of industrialization and urbanization are now notably balanced – without downplaying the terrible realities of urban poverty and labor exploitation. In the 2014 version, western settlement was discussed almost entirely in terms of its dire impact on increasingly besieged native peoples, with no attention given to the settlers’ aims and worldview (a crucial part of the story, whatever we think today of their actions in pursuit of those aims); now, Indians’ plight and resistance receive just as much weight as before—but the settler viewpoint is explained as well.

The 2014 framework seemed to invite students to condemn the use of the atomic bomb on Japan in 1945; now it is presented as a disputed point. Coverage of the Reagan era—always difficult ground, given its contested place in today’s political battles – came across as dismissive in the 2014 version; now it notably avoids taking sides, presenting both the roots and goals of the New Conservatism as well as its critics’ views.

Other changes simply improved substance and clarity. The key role of Washington and the first Congress in making the constitutional system work is now noted. The reasons for colonial objections to parliamentary taxation are now discussed, making better sense of Revolutionary grievances. The blind-spots of some Progressive-era activists towards minorities and immigrants are now given appropriate and contextual coverage (thus expanding discussion of racial segregation and the prevalence of violent racial prejudice).

None of these changes even remotely amount to “triumphalism.” Slavery, war, poverty and minorities’ long struggles for rights and recognition are not downplayed or whitewashed—they are simply presented in context, without a biased tone of presentistic judgment.

Yet, ironically, many critics on the left have branded the revision (often without reading it, let alone comparing the two versions) a right-wing paean to… American exceptionalism (as well as a shameful “cave” to right-wing pressure, and a tissue of white-male-only history suppressing the realities of slavery, oppression, and prejudice). Professor Williamjames Hull Hoffer, appearing opposite me on a CBS Evening News segment about the revisions, denounced any suggestion that western settlers displayed a “pioneering spirit” seeking “economic opportunity” as “not just a change in emphasis” but “a lie,” and any mention of liberty, citizenship, self-government and free enterprise as American ideals to be “Donald Trump talking points.”

Such backlash was inevitable: since pressure against the 2014 framework (much of it irrationally extreme) came chiefly from the right, any change would be viewed by the left as craven surrender, and presumed to be a sanitized, triumphalist whitewash. (A shallow media narrative and social media meme—College Board folds under right-wing pressure!—has not helped people view the revision on its merits.) In short, the framework became a symbolic political football—for both sides—more than a matter for substantive debate.

But the problem is even more fundamental. Many on both left and right don’t want history to be taught with neutrality, balance, or context—for they believe history education should inculcate a particular ideology… even if they differ violently on which ideology should be promoted. Many on the right want a vision of America that sanitizes past injustices at the root of present-day grievances. Many on the left promote a decontextualized condemnation of the past, urging students to assail historical actions as if they occurred amidst today’s pluralistic ideas of rights and diversity.

In fact, all such ideological indoctrination is not only bad history, but bad civic education. Students can only understand history on its own terms—and they can only understand the nation as it is today if they understand where all parts of it came from, not only those given a selective stamp of political and moral approval. There is an indisputable need to include those previously excluded from America’s narrative; focusing only on those who were dominant—as too many on the right still seem to prefer—leaves out the history of most Americans! But now, too many on the left wish to exclude the previously included, or reduce them to simplistic villainous caricature. None of this makes for informed citizens with a sophisticated understanding of who we all are and where we all came from—and how today’s pluralistic values, against which so much of our past does look so ugly, ever became possible.

New AP US History Exam Perpetuates Lies About Native Americans

By Tanya H. Lee, Indian Country Today, September 8, 2015
http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2015/09/08/new-ap-us-history-exam-perpetuates-lies-about-native-americans-161628

American exceptionalism is back.

The College Board, having deleted the term in its highly-controversial 2014 revision of the AP U.S. History Curriculum Framework, has reinstated it in the 2015 revision, which came out at the end of July.

Three American Indian history scholars reviewed the curriculum in detail at ICTMN’s request.

Shannon Speed, Chickasaw, director of Native American and Indigenous Studies at the University of Texas Austin, defines American exceptionalism. “What it means is the notion that America is an exceptional country, the greatest country in the world, founded on laudable principles, and that while there were minor things like genocide and slavery, really in the end we should all rally around our identity as Americans because those things were asides in this big narrative of American history.”

The term, says James Riding In, Pawnee Nation of Oklahoma, is “an attempt to distort history and to place white Americans above reproach, condemnation, and culpability.” Riding In is associate professor of American Indian Studies at Arizona State University.

The treatment of American Indians in the narrative of U.S. history is an issue that K. Tsianina Lomawaima, Mvskoke/Creek Nation, professor of Justice and Social Inquiry, and Distinguished Scholar in Indigenous Education at Arizona State University’s Center for Indian Education, also finds troubling. She cites this statement in the curriculum: “Latino, American Indian, and Asian American movements continued to demand social and economic equality and redress of past injustices.”

Lomawaima says, “No, no, no. These are not equivalent categories. [These groups] have very different goals in mind. [This statement is] once again erasing indigenous sovereignty and sliding American Indians in as just another piece of the so-called racial-ethnic mix. That’s part of the whole impulse to erase, eliminate the Native, because that gets rid of the problem, which is—this nation was founded on the illegal acquisition of Native lands”….

There are underlying problems with the overall approach of the curriculum, says Lomawaima. Throughout most of the document, she notes, the taking of Indian lands is presented as a natural outcome of the movement of different groups of people across the country. But, she says, terms like “seizure of their [American Indians’] lands,” suggest a more accurate understanding of American Indian-settler interactions.

Speed comments on another problem, how the curriculum treats what was essentially the enslavement of Native peoples, noting that a description of the encomienda system is preceded by this statement, “Spanish exploration and the conquest of the Americas were accompanied and furthered by widespread deadly epidemics that devastated Native populations….”

Speed says, “This is true, but what happens with the [order in which the points are] presented is a lot of students come away with the idea that the depopulation of the American continent was largely accidental—it happened because Europeans brought germs with them and they didn’t know everybody was going to get sick and die. Certainly many people did die of European diseases. But that is only a part of what happened and a large part of what happened, besides open warfare, which was significant, was forced labor, which killed lots of people.”

…For work so important—and so fraught with centuries of conquest, oppression and prejudice—a more representative group of scholars might have produced a less problematic document where intent and execution were more aligned.

As Lomawaima notes, “[The curriculum] doesn’t say to celebrate American exceptionalism. It just includes it as a topic. I couldn’t find anything in the language here that would mandate one way or another either celebrating or critiquing American exceptionalism. It just puts it into the mix as a component of the character or the conversations about this nation. And I think in that respect it’s correct. It has been a powerful ideology. It continues to be a powerful ideology.”

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History in the Headlines

The Controversy Over Confederate Statues on the University of Texas at Austin Campus 

A swirl of angry emotions often surrounds the way that the past is portrayed. In recent years, controversy has swirled around movies, like Oliver Stone’s JFK, and public monuments, including the design of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial and the Vietnam Memorial, and the display by the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum of the Enola Gay, the airplane used to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945.

At issue is how the past should be commemorated and memorialized–and who should decide. Let’s look at one controversy: What to do about the statues of Confederate officers and officials that stood near the south entrance to the University of Texas at Austin campus?

Early in the twentieth century, George Littlefield, a Confederate veteran, regent, and the University of Texas’s largest benefactor during its first 50 years, wanted to create a monument to Confederate leaders on the campus so that future generations would remember “these grand patriots who gave up their lives for the cause of liberty and self-government.”

Littlefield was one of many former supporters of the Confederacy who, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, would erect monuments to what they called “The Lost Cause.”

In 1916, he commissioned an Italian sculptor Pompeo Coppini to carry out his vision, which included a massive bronze arch, two pylons, and six statues arranged together around a fountain. Coppini recognized that a monument commemorating the Confederacy would be highly controversial. He wrote:“As time goes by, they [future generations] will look to the Civil War as a blot on the pages of American history, and the Littlefield Memorial will be resented as keeping up the hatred between the Northern and Southern states.”

Coppini wanted to recast the monument as a memorial to the 97 University of Texas students and alumni killed in World War I and as an acknowledgement that WWI had finally reunited the North and South, half a century after the Civil War.

The Littlefield monument was not unveiled until 1933. Despite Coppini’s efforts to present the monument as a symbol of national reconciliation rather than as a tribute to the Confederacy, opposition immediately arose from some faculty members to the decision to place four statues of former Confederate leaders—Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, Albert Sidney Johnston, and John Reagan at the southern entrance to the university. Over the years, such opposition resurfaced repeatedly.

To quell the controversy over the presence of the Confederate statues, the campus sought to create “balance” by erecting five statues of people of color: Martin Luther King Jr. (1999), César Chávez (2007), Barbara Jordan (2009), and Heisman trophy winners Earl Campbell (2006) and Ricky Williams (2012). The university also named a new residence hall and renamed its Geography building in honor of African Americans and renamed a dormitory that had been named for a former Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.

Nevertheless, protests persisted, and in 2015, the campus president established a taskforce to recommend a course of action. Ultimately, the university decided to remove the statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis from its place near the university’s iconic clock tower, and have it moved to the campus’ American history archive, the Briscoe Center. Meanwhile, a statue of President Woodrow Wilson was also relocated to the Center to “preserve the symmetry of the Main Mall.”

However, the statues of other Confederate figures remained as did an inscription adjacent to the Littlefield Fountain dedicating the memorial “to the men and women of the Confederacy.”

Explaining why the other statues would remain, the university president, Gregory Fenves, wrote that James Hogg (who had no direct ties to the Confederacy), Albert Sidney Johnston, and John H. Reagan “had deep ties to Texas” and “Robert E. Lee’s complicated legacy to Texas and the nation should not be reduced to his role in the Civil War.”

Ten days before the beginning of the Fall 2017 semester, the university removed the statues of Robert E. Lee, Albert Sidney Johnston and John Reagan from the mall, stating that they depict parts of American history that “run counter to the university’s core values.”  A statue of former Texas Gov. James Stephen Hogg was also marked for removal. The removal occurred about a week after unrest in Charlottesville, Virginia surrounding the removal of Confederate statues in that college town. Neo-Nazis and white supremacists protested those statues’ removal, and clashed violently with counter-protesters. One person died in the violence. 

The university stated that it chose to remove the statues in the middle of the night “for public safety and to minimize disruption to the community.” The three Confederate statues will be relocated to the campus’ Briscoe Center for American History, while the statue of former Governor Hogg “will be considered for re-installation at another campus site.”