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Why Do Approved American History Textbooks Contain Missing Links

October 21, 2024 Jim Mamer, Scheer Post. , , ,
We study American history for important reasons. We study because it helps us understand how events in the past continue to influence the present. We study because American history tells us who we are. Yet teaching a full and honest history is much more difficult than it should be. There are history textbooks that ignore the fact that white elites grew rich off the labor of the enslaved. There are textbooks that continue to minimize extraordinary struggles for universal suffrage. There are textbooks that fail to examine the long-term effects of forcing Indigenous young people into off-reservation boarding schools.

A Day Of Action: Educators Pledge To Teach The Truth, June 12

May 21, 2021 Zinned Project. , , ,
Lawmakers in at least 15 states are attempting to pass legislation that would require teachers to lie to students about the role of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and oppression throughout U.S. history.

‘How The South Won The Civil War’

August 4, 2020 BillMoyers.com. , , ,
If you think about the Civil War as a war between two different ideologies, two different concepts of what America is supposed to be, is it supposed to be a place where a few wealthy men direct the labor and the lives of the people below them, the women and people of color below them, the way the Confederacy argued? Is that America? Or is America what Lincoln and his ilk in the Republican Party in the North defined the democracy as during the Civil War? Is it a place where all men are equal before the law and should have equal access to resources? And of course, I use the word man there, but that’s because that’s the language that Lincoln used.

The Uphill Battle For Voting Rights Continues

February 4, 2019 By Amani Sawari, Sawarimi.org  , , ,
After the Civil War, freed enslaved Africans obtained their rights of citizenship but after working unpaid for centuries those rights were limited, still restricting them from the right to vote. This barred us from influencing policy and not only, contributing to the political welfare of our country, but even more devastatingly it closed us off from benefiting from our country politically. This meant that if we wanted to see change or any improvement on some aspect of our community then we had to hope that someone from outside of our community would recognize that need and commit to making that change.

MLK Beyond Vietnam Speech Relevant To War & Justice Today

January 19, 2019 Staff, www.unitedforpeace.org , , , ,
By Staff of United for Peace & Justice - 50 years ago, on April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church, in NYC, Martin Luther King delivered his powerful and most controversial speech, “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence”. No longer willing to keep silent about the immorality of the Vietnam War, knowing the intense criticism he would receive for speaking out, he nevertheless was compelled to speak, “I am here tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice”. King spoke against war and its crippling effects on social progress. He denounced the death and destruction in Vietnam and the waste of billions on an immoral war. All this at the expense of the poor and those serving in the military.

Time To Abolish Columbus Day

October 7, 2018 Bill Bigelow, www.zinnedproject.org ,
By Bill Bigelow for Teaching A People's History, Once again this year many schools will pause to commemorate Christopher Columbus. Given everything we know about who Columbus was and what he launched in the Americas, this needs to stop. Columbus initiated the trans-Atlantic slave trade, in early February 1494, first sending several dozen enslaved Taínos to Spain. Columbus described those he enslaved as “well made and of very good intelligence,” and recommended to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella that taxing slave shipments could help pay for supplies needed in the Indies. A year later, Columbus intensified his efforts to enslave Indigenous people in the Caribbean.

July 4th: No Time For Celebration For Indigenous Peoples In US

July 4, 2018 Staff, www.telesurtv.net , , ,
By Staff of Tele Sur - The Anglo-American settlers’ violent break from Britain, from 1775 to 1783, paralleled a decade of their search and destroy annihilation of Delaware, Cherokee, Muskogee, Seneca, Mohawk, Shawnee, Miami and other nations’ villages and fields, slaughtering the residents without distinction of age or gender and overrunning the boundaries of the 13 colonies into unceded Native American territories. July 4 symbolizes the beginning of the “Indian wars” and “westward movement” that continued across the continent for another century of unrelenting U.S. wars of conquest.

Turning King’s Dream Into A Nightmare

January 15, 2018 By Chris Hedges, Truthdig.com , ,
Martin Luther King Day has become a yearly ritual to turn a black radical into a red-white-and-blue icon. It has become a day to celebrate ourselves for “overcoming” racism and “fulfilling” King’s dream. It is a day filled with old sound bites about little black children and little white children that, given the state of America, would enrage King. Most of our great social reformers, once they are dead, are kidnapped by the power elite and turned into harmless props of American glory. King, after all, was not only a socialist but fiercely opposed to American militarism and acutely aware, especially at the end of his life, that racial justice without economic justice was a farce. “King’s words have been appropriated by the people who rejected him in the 1960s,” said Professor James Cone, who teaches at Union Theological Seminary in New York and who wrote the book “Martin & Malcolm & America.”

76 Years Of Pearl Harbor Lies

December 8, 2017 David Swanson, warisacrime.org , , ,
By David Swanson for War Is A Crime - Donald Trump is tweeting about a particular spot in Hawaii. He visited it recently on his way to threaten war in Asia. It’s a big feature this week in lots of U.S. magazines and newspapers. It has a lovely name that sounds like murder and blood because Japanese airplanes engaged in large-scale murder there in 1941: Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor Day today is like Columbus Day 50 years ago. That is to say: most people still believe the hype. The myths are still maintained in their blissful unquestioned state. “New Pearl Harbors” are longed for by war makers, claimed, and exploited. Yet the original Pearl Harbor remains the most popular U.S. argument for all things military, including the long-delayed remilitarization of Japan — not to mention the WWII internment of Japanese Americans as a model for targeting other groups today. Believers in Pearl Harbor imagine for their mythical event, in contrast to today, a greater U.S. innocence, a purer victimhood, a higher contrast of good and evil, and a total necessity of defensive war making. The facts do not support the mythology. The United States government did not need to make Japan a junior partner in imperialism, did not need to fuel an arms race, did not need to support Nazism and fascism (as some of the biggest U.S. corporations did right through the war), did not need to provoke Japan, did not need to join the war in Asia or Europe, and was not surprised by the attack on Pearl Harbor. For support of each of these statements, keep reading.

Thanksgiving a Celebration of White Barbarity

November 23, 2017 Glen Ford, www.blackagendareport.com , ,
By Glen Ford for The Black Commentator - Nobody but Americans celebrates Thanksgiving. It is reserved by history and the intent of “the founders” as the supremely white American holiday, the most ghoulish event on the national calendar. No Halloween of the imagination can rival the exterminationist reality that was the genesis, and remains the legacy, of the American Thanksgiving. It is the most loathsome, humanity-insulting day of the year – a pure glorification of racist barbarity. We at are thankful that the day grows nearer when the almost four centuries-old abomination will be deprived of its reason for being: white supremacy.

Columbus Day Was A Gift From Sleepy Hollow Author Washington Irving

October 9, 2017 William Francis Keegan, www.theconversation.com , ,
By William Francis Keegan for Red Green and Blue - In 1496, Columbus was the governor of a colony based at Santo Domingo, in what is now the modern Dominican Republic – a job he hated. He could not convince the other “colonists,” especially those with noble titles, to follow his leadership. They were not colonists in the traditional sense of the word. They had gone to the Indies to get rich quick. Because Columbus was unable to temper their lust, the Crown viewed him as an incompetent administrator. The colony was largely a social and economic failure. The wealth that Columbus promised the Spanish monarchs failed to materialize, and he made continuous requests for additional financial support, which the monarchs reluctantly provided. By 1500, conditions in Hispaniola were so dire that the Crown sent Francisco de Bobadilla to investigate. Bobadilla’s first sight, at the mouth of the Ozama River, was four Spanish “mutineers” hanging from gallows. Under authority from the king, Bobadilla arrested Columbus and his brothers for malfeasance and sent them to Spain in chains. Columbus waited seven months for an audience at the court. He refused to have his chains removed until the meeting, and even asked in his will to be buried with the chains.

Baltimore To Keep, Clean Defaced Francis Scott Key Statue

September 14, 2017 Colin Campbell and Sean Welsh, www.baltimoresun.com , , ,
By Colin Campbell and Sean Welsh for The Baltimore Sun - Mayor Catherine Pugh says she has no plans to remove the Francis Scott Key monument in Bolton Hill that was vandalized before dawn Wednesday and has directed art preservation experts to determine the cost of cleaning it. Exactly 203 years after the Maryland attorney wrote the poem that would later become the national anthem, the city awoke to find the words “Racist Anthem” spray-painted on the Eutaw Place monument and red paint splashed on it. The third stanza of Key’s poem includes a reference accusing the British of encouraging American slaves to join the fight against their masters. City officials said they know of no way to prevent future vandalism, short of catching the person or people responsible. Police don’t have any suspects or surveillance footage of the incident. “Ultimately, it’s going to come down to them being caught and charged,” police spokesman T.J. Smith said. Officers make periodic checks on city property during their patrols, but the department does not plan to place the Key monument under constant police protection, Smith said. “We can’t ensure it’s not going to happen again,” Pugh spokesman Anthony McCarthy said. He said, however, the mayor does not plan to take it down and wants to see it restored.

No To War Call To Action

September 9, 2017 Staff, www.notowar.net , , ,
By Staff of No To War - The Afghan war, which has been a thoroughly bipartisan effort, was originally railed against by Donald Trump when he was running for president. He claimed to be against U.S. troop involvement in Afghanistan. Now he is moving forward with a “secret” plan of escalation that will also include Pakistan. He says the secrecy is to keep the “enemy” from knowing his plans, but it also keeps the U.S. people from knowing what he is doing in our name and from judging the human costs for the people of Afghanistan, Pakistan and the United States. What we do know is that military escalation has repeatedly failed to bring peace in Afghanistan. It has caused more destruction and more deaths of civilians and soldiers alike and has cost trillions of dollars that could be spent on meeting basic needs here at home while repairing the destruction we have carried out abroad. Trump also emboldens the war machine here in the US against Black and Brown people and immigrants by fanning white supremacy and xenophobia and continuing the militarization of the police and ICE to incite racially-motivated violence and justify repression, including mass incarceration and mass deportations.

The Road To Charlottesville: Reflections On 21st Century U.S. Capitalist Racism

September 8, 2017 Paul Street, www.counterpunch.org , , ,
By Paul Street for Counter Punch - The United States, where median Black household wealth is less than 7 cents on the white household dollar and where the mild slogan “Black lives matter” is considered controversial, is still very much a racist nation. Grasping the nature of this national racism in 21stcentury means looking at the different levels on which race operates here. One level is at the nation’s discursive and symbolic surface. It is about language, imagery, signs, the color of elite personnel, representation, and, well, symbols. A different and deeper level is institutional and structural. It’s about how labor markets, the financial sector, the real estate industry, the educational system, the criminal justice complex, the military state, the corporate system, the dominant media, and capitalism more broadly all work to deepen, maintain, and/or reduce racial oppression and inequality. At the surface and symbolic level, racism has experienced significant defeats in the United States since the rise of the Civil Rights Movement in the middle and late 1950s. Open public bigotry has been largely defeated in the nation’s corporate-crafted public culture.

The Non-Violent Berkeley Movement In The 1960s

September 2, 2017 Julia Stein, www.counterpunch.org , , ,
By Julia Stein for Counter Punch - After graduating UC Berkeley in 1968, I returned to Berkeley to visit friends May 1969 when People’s Park was being built. I had gotten arrested for Free Speech in 1964, and had seen for months how the “mainstream” press had attacked our non-violent Free Speech Movement (FSM). For months my boss told me that she believed the Oakland Tribune newspapers that the leaders of the FSM were Communists. For months I said the leaders of FSM were civil rights activists except for one Communist—Bettina Aptheker who was a moderating influence. My months of denials never affected my boss at all. After I got out of jail, I called my parents the next night, telling them I had been arrested in the sit-in. FSM had run orderly sit-in, giving us instructions to stay out of administration’s offices, which we scrupulously followed. My mother asked, “The LA Times said the people in the sit-in went in and broke into somebody’s office.” “No, we didn’t,” I said. Later we heard that a high administration bureaucrat at Berkeley had told that fallacious bit of news to the press who reprinted it until a second high official said, “No, my office was not broken into. I just keep a messy office.”
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