Read on Twitter
Mini-thread just real quick as a PSA for the news of the day: If you would like to read about the looooong history of conservatives trying to use classrooms to distort American history in ways that deliberately uphold white supremacy, check out the following: (1)
https://www.amazon.com/Mothers-Massive-Resistance-Politics-Supremacy/dp/0190088397/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&hvadid=78065395163606&hvbmt=be&hvdev=c&hvqmt=e&keywords=mother%27s+of+massive+resistance&qid=1600373913&sr=8-1&tag=mh0b-20 A fantastic read and great starting place is Mothers of Massive Resistance by Elizabeth McRae, which shows about a century of white segregationists trying to misrepresent slavery and Reconstruction to hold up the Jim Crow South (2) ...
...and then distorting Jim Crow to avoid integrating in the Civil rights era (3)
Then you should go read Classroom Wars by @nataliapetrzela to see how this same thing worked to exclude Spanish language instruction in California https://www.amazon.com/Classroom-Wars-Language-Political-Culture/dp/0190675098/ref=sr_1_1?crid=335QAPVSTG9M4&dchild=1&keywords=natalia+mehlman+petrzela&qid=1600374038&sprefix=natalia+meh%2Caps%2C178&sr=8-1 (4)
And then you should go read about how ultraright school boards have been trying to call the slave trade the "Triangular Trade" through textbook purchasing in Texas https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2010/0519/Texas-textbook-war-Slavery-or-Atlantic-triangular-trade (5)
& then you should see how high schoolers (not all of whom were even IN the AP History course) walked out when a school board majority tried to force a "patriotic" curriculum change in JeffCo where I grew up https://www.westword.com/news/jeffco-student-walkouts-rebellious-kids-stand-up-against-patriotic-history-plan-5826204 (this was hundreds of kids demanding history) (6)
And then somebody post the bios of the historians at today's White House conference and #twitterstorians can unpack their credentials (7)
And at the risk of sounding mean, we can then unpack our own credentials and bore you all with how historians verify claims! (8)
