Slavery, the Civil War Era, and African American Representation in U.S. History: An Analysis of Four States' Academic Standards

Manifesting Destiny: Re/presentations of Indigenous Peoples in K–12 U.S. History Standards

“…Specifically, Journell found these states portrayed slavery as an "undesirable occurrence in American history that was eventually rectified" by the Civil War, Civil Rights Movement, and ultimately the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (p. 46). Likewise, Anderson and Metzger (2011) found standards in Michigan, New Jersey, South Carolina, and Virginia failed to engage students in a critical study of racialized identities and racial tensions during the Civil War and Reconstruction. These studies point to a persistent trend in textbook and curriculum-making to silence racial inequality in the story of the United States.…”

The narrative framing of violence in teaching resources about the Spanish Conquest of America.

“…Yet, since narratives embody a vantage point and are politically positioned, minorities, marginalized or alternative groups within or outside a community maintain parallel narratives. A considerable amount of empirical research has been devoted to the analysis of how teachers, students and textbook narratives deal with the differing perspectives of dominant/marginal or majority/minority groups (Anderson, 2012;Anderson & Metzger, 2011;Barton & McCully, 2005;Clark, 2007;Epstein, 2009;Shear, Knowles, Soden, & Castro, 2015). Narratives also result from the strategic production of particular groups or organizations (including the Nation-State), which generate institutional narratives that instrumentalize the past in support of particular agendas.…”

Examining Justice in Social Studies Research

“…Brown and Brown (2010) found that the 5 th and 8 th grade U.S. history textbooks' "representations fall short of adequately illustrating how racial violence operated systematically to oppress and curtail African Americans' opportunities and social mobility in the United States," and this failure of "limited representation of racial violence has an adverse effect on the larger sociocultural memory and sociocultural knowledge available to students, thus limiting the extent to which all students can truly understand the historical significance of racial inequities" (p. 150). In their analysis of U.S. history standards in four states, Anderson and Metzger (2011) write, that the standards represented an overly simplistic view of history that failed "to consider that attitudes about slavery existed on a continuum at the time and that slavery was a deeply entrenched economic, political, and social institution and not just a moral failing on the part of individuals." (p. 407).…”