Posted on 12/14/2020 6:52:52 AM PST by re_tail20
I remember several years ago watching a documentary about James Meredith, the African-American veteran who was able to enroll in the University of Mississippi in 1961 after overcoming considerable resistance from Governor Ross Barnett on down. I particularly remember one scene in which Governor Barnett was on the phone with one of the Kennedys saying that Mr. Meredith was registering for his first course, “American Colonial History”.
I asked myself while watching it, “Why is there a separate course on American Colonial History ? Why not just a full course on United States History, of which American Colonial History was the beginning part ? After all, that’s what I had gone through in my required ‘United States History’ course.
In the years of thinking between then and now, I’ve done a complete 180 degrees.
The “American Colonial History” course that Mr. Meredith was registering for would have probably covered the times period between 1492, which Christoph Columbo (his real name) landed on San Salvador, and 1776, when the Declaration of Independence was signed, or 1787, when the U. S. Constitution was signed (Take your pick).
I attended an upper middle income public elementary school, an upper middle income public junior high school, and an upper middle income public high school in the 1970’s and 1980’s.
Most of all, through that time, in my required Social Studies and U. S. History classes, for example, I never really learned how this “Chattel African Negro Enslavement” thing begin in the first place.
I was never told about or learned about John Punch, an African-American indentured servant in 1640 who, along with two white indentured servant friends of his, tried to run away from their Virginia servitude and free lives in Maryland. All three were caught, tried, and convicted. In the double standard that followed, Punch’s two white friends were sentenced to an additional four years of indentured servitude, while he was sentenced to enslavement for life.
I was never told about or learned about (Nathaniel) Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia in 1676, or the Virginia Slave Codes that came after it.
If not for the Internet, I still wouldn’t know about either of these things.
For decades this has been a huge blind spot for all American kids and teens of all races in all income levels, whether in Public School, Private School, or Home School, and it still is.
in my opinion, simply taking "American Colonial History" and squeezing it into "United States History", as was done with my United States History course 36 years ago, and in the textbook I used, is just wrong and disingenuous.
Did “American Colonial History” exist at the pre-college level and pre-university level in the 1960’s and before ? I don’t know. What I do know is that now, more than ever before in our history, when we make anything and everything about race, it needs to be.
I’ve always thought there should be a “Lessons from the Life and Character of George Washington” segment in EVERY history course taught be a public school.
The 1619 Project is an ongoing project developed by The New York Times Magazine in 2019 which “aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of [the United States’] national narrative”.
Are you on the right forum?
We need to quit farming out text book production and selection to COMMUNIST organizations!!!
History, shmistory. I was homeschooled, but my public school peers got NO history until high school, and not much of it then.
And I was born in the Clinton years. It’s probably worse now. As in false history.
History is dead.
Nobody studies history anymore, and every student takes only the minimum requirement.
None care, except the SJWs who are rewriting it.
And they are poorer for it.
How about bad things happening in the past was just too bad, and teaching people that being affected is not being afflicted.
Being woke, and therefore making people be miserable, is no way to go through life.
You don’t need know history for socialist to explain why history was bad. Actually knowing history, especially the history of socialism, is detrimental to being indoctrinated to be a socialist.
Kinda like how being grateful is poison to feeling entitled.
Part of Colonial History should include how colonialist physically lived.
Not many..if any ...conveniences...and while much of what we now consider primitive there was something to be said for it. If you wanted food...you had to hunt for it..and or grow it.
..and or trade for it.
If you wanted heat for fall and winter ...you had to chop your wood..by hand.
So, let me get this straight. You're saying they should be separate?
bump
There were some fair to middlin’ shows about this on NPR at one time. Colonial House was one I think. Another was about settlers further west.
I was totally in awe of the amount of wood needed to get through a winter. They could have fortified their cabins with the chords of wood necessary! They must have had arms of steel!
It is called looking South of the border as the Cartels are colonizing black neighborhoods in Chicago to do sex slave trade and sell cocaine there.
“They must have had arms of steel!”
And that probably included the teen age girls.
In fact, i would wager that most of teen age girls,of that era, could beat the snot out of probably half the 20 something males of today.
This is why our book, “A Patriot’s History of the United States” is subtitled “From Columbus’s Great Discovery to the Age of Entitlement.”
I start my Wild World of History US History curriculum at 1492 (www.wildworldofhistory.com) and have a separate lesson series in the VIP pay section called “The 1620 Default” that argues that American EXCEPTIONALISM (not history) begins in Plymouth, not Jamestown because Jamestown didn’t have the critical elements of a Protestant (Puritan) bottom up religious tradition or the bottom up common law that came on the Mayflower.
While we’re at it, lets also teach West African history for the 15-17th Century.
Life was horrible for anyone not in some seaside chief’s power.
It was these people who gathered up their poor, defeated enemies to be sold into slavery in the first place. The Muslims taught them that defeated people were slaves unless they converted, so you could make a profit by not killing them. (this treatment was better than what the Aztecs did to defeated enemies, BTW).
It was the Portuguese and Spanish who learned that making serfs out of Indians didn’t work well because they died so easily from old world diseases. However, black Africans not only thrived, they could work in the hot sun without any problems. And then the Dutch learned to trade stuff for men from those local, seaside chiefs.
This was all BEFORE the colonial history of British America even began.
“I never really learned how this “Chattel African Negro Enslavement””
Hasn’t our early slavery and the Civil War to eliminate it always been taught? In our pre-college courses there’s only limited time to cover the entire history of America.
Today loud public voices want our kids to be trained that America’s past is filled with shame and our present is still filled with shame.
The primary reason to separate colonial history from US history is to demonstrate that this country had legalized slavery for 80 years (end of the American Revolution - de facto independence - in 1783 through the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863) - and that in three more years, slavery will have been outlawed for twice as long as it was legal (160 years).
Kinda puts things in perspective...
History books change over the years. I once had one from 1898 and one from 1917. Both had different renditions of US history.
One book had a map showing New Mexico and Arizona were to be slave states.
The other book had the same map showing they were to be free states.
Early in the year, I ran into a kid of grade-school age and his father who were visiting the Richard Nixon Presidential Library. We started talking about the Vietnam War and the boy made a reference to the Hundred Years War. I assumed that very few boys his age would have even heard of that war, so I asked him where he went to school. He told me he was homeschooled.
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