"Teaching the History Wars" Topic

"For more than a century, academics, policymakers, politicians, and pundits have waged the seemingly endless "history wars" over what students should learn about our nation's past. But students themselves have been largely absent from these debates. While William Randolph Hearst's newspapers criticized textbook publishers in the 1920s for their sympathetic portrayals of Benedict Arnold, or Lynne Cheney and Gary B. Nash battled over the National History Standards in the 1990s, most students likely remained unaware that such battles were even happening.

My own anecdotal evidence suggests this is still the case. For the past eight years, I have taught a course on the history wars for first-year undergraduates. At Denison University, located outside Columbus, Ohio, first-year seminars serve primarily as an introduction to college-level writing, but instructors choose the class's focus. I thought the history wars would be an engaging topic for students to read and think about as they wrestled with genre, argument, revision, and other elements of first-year composition.

It turned out to be much more. Teaching the history wars, I've discovered, is a fantastic way to introduce students both to the contingent and contested nature of historical practice and to current efforts to restrict the history they and their peers can learn…"

More here

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Armand

It used to be "the winner of wars got to write the history"

Now it is the 21st century Woke that does!

(smile)

Armand

Orwellian :)

Ha!

Armand