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Teaching Real “Patriotic History” [1]

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Date: 2025-06-01

“Nations reel and stagger on their way; they make hideous mistakes; they commit frightful wrongs; they do great and beautiful things. And shall we not best guide humanity by telling the truth about all this, so far as the truth is ascertainable?” W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America (1935)

June 7, 2025 is the fifth annual Zinn Education Project Teach the Truth Day of Action. There are programs being conducted all across the country. There will be a zoom workshop on “Teaching Real ‘Patriotic History’” from 10 AM until noon. You can register at this link.

These are difficult times and teachers must be prepared to take risks in defense of our ability to teach and the ability of our students to learn. The Trump administration, in its push for “patriotic history” and preparation for the July 2026 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence revived the January 2021 President’s Advisory Commission “The 1776 Report” with an Executive Order nine days after his inauguration. He claimed his goal was ending radical anti-American indoctrination in K-12 schools. In a March 27, 2025, Trump charged that there is a “concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth. This revisionist movement seeks to undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.” Trump’s first attack was on displays at Smithsonian Museums and National Park websites.

My concern as a historian and teacher committed to teaching the complex truth about the past is that if Trump’s goals are implemented, schools will be required to present students with a whitewashed version of American history. I use whitewash in both senses of the word, cleansed of negative references and white-biased.

At a time when democracy in the United States is threatened by a Trump administration that claims excessive executive power that run counter to principles imbedded in the Constitution and violates rights established in the 1st, 5th, and 14th amendments, it is more important than ever that teachers insist on the ability to examine with their students United States history with all its blemishes and inconsistencies. It must include the impact of white domestic terrorism from the age of chattel slavery to the founding of the Ku Klux Klan by Confederate veterans in 1865, the Tulsa race massacre in 1921, the murder and mutilation of Emmett Till in 1955, the Birmingham Church bombing in 1963, the killing of civil rights workers in 1964, the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968, the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, and the Charlottesville neo-Nazi Unite the Right rally in 2017. A genuine patriotic history is history that teaches the truth about the past equipping students to actively defend democracy in this country.

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