history education — Bunk History

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A stack of books in a classroom.

The Racism of History Textbooks

How history textbooks reinforced narratives of racism, and the fight to change those books from the 1940s to the present.

by Jonathan Zimmerman, Livia Gershon via JSTOR Daily on October 20, 2015

Portrait of Edward Gibbon

Bonfire of the Humanities

Historians are losing their audience, and searching for the next trend won’t win it back.

by Samuel Moyn via The Nation on January 21, 2015

Columbus and crew landing boat at San Salvador

1492: Columbus in American Memory

Columbus Day is here again -- along with the controversy over its namesake. How have earlier generations understood him?

via BackStory on October 10, 2014

Illustration of angry communist with caption "Primer for Free Men."

I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill

History books are rewritten to focus on the underdog. Surely that is a victory for the common people...or is it?

by Stephen Duncombe via The Baffler on January 13, 2013

The History of History

How historians and educators have written and taught about different eras of the American past.

Thanks a Lot, Ken Burns

Because of you, my Civil War lecture is always packed with students raised on your romantic, deeply misleading portrait of the conflict.

by James M. Lundberg via Slate on June 7, 2011

Origins of Black History Month

Why did Carter G. Woodson choose February, and what was his vision for the annual commemoration?

by Daryl Michael Scott via Association for the Study of African American Life on February 1, 2011

Against Presentism

An argument against looking at our past through the lens of today.

by Lynn A. Hunt via Perspectives on History on May 1, 2002

Mel and Norma Gabler.

The Guardians Who Slumbereth Not

Textbook watchdogs Mel and Norma Gabler are good, sincere, dedicated people, who just may be destroying your child’s education.

by William Martin via Texas Monthly on November 1, 1982

The date "1619" bolded against a gray background.

Engaging The 1619 Project

A collection of resources challenging the notion that the U.S. was built on nothing but injustice and subjugation.

via RealClearPublicAffairs

Directors Sarah Botstein and Ken Burns look at a bust of George Washington

Ken Burns’s Wake-Up Call

Ken Burns’s newest docuseries may have its shortcomings, but others looking to tell the story of the Founding could learn from his attention to detail.

by Susan Brynne Long via Law & Liberty on December 15, 2025

Surrealism Against Fascism

A century ago, artists who survived the trenches captured humanity’s capacity for destruction. What can they teach us in a new age of genocide?

by Naomi Klein via Equator on November 26, 2025

“The Scourged Back” shows the scarred back of escaped slave Peter Gordon in Louisiana, 1863. (McPherson & Oliver/National Gallery of Art)

National Park to Remove Photo of Enslaved Man’s Scars

The Trump administration is ordering the removal of information on slavery at multiple national parks in an effort to scrub them of “corrosive ideology.”

by Hannah Natanson, Jake Spring via Washington Post on September 15, 2025

A Mr. Nelson collage deisgn, of orange and black and white designs.

The Lost Art Of Thinking Historically

We must see the world as actors of the past did: through a foggy windshield, not a rearview mirror, facing a future of radical uncertainty.

by Francis J. Gavin via Noema on September 11, 2025

Demonstrators march, carrying signs against firing City College faculty.

Eric Foner’s Personal History

Reflecting on his decades-long career, the historian considers what his field of study owes to the public.

by Eric Foner via The Nation on August 14, 2025

Young Latino children holding a small American flags.

The Diversity Bell That Trump Can’t Un-ring

The biggest problem with the history Trump wants to impose on us is that it never, in fact, existed.

by Geraldo Cadava via The New Republic on August 7, 2025

An abolitionist lithograph depicting enslaved people celebrating the Fourth of July while a white judge sits on bales of cotton with his feet on the Constitution, 1840

The Contradictory Revolution

Historians have long grappled with “the American Paradox” of Revolutionary leaders who fought for their own liberty while denying it to enslaved Black people.

by David S. Reynolds via New York Review of Books on July 31, 2025

The History of Government Influence Over Universities

During the Cold War, the government relied on universities for research, but also saw scholars as dangerous.

by Jeffrey Rosario via Made By History on May 20, 2025

National Museum of African American History and Culture.

What It Means to Tell the Truth About America

And what happens when empirical fact is labeled “improper ideology.”

by Clint Smith via The Atlantic on April 21, 2025

General Ulysses S. Grant receiving Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox.

Appomattox Exposes the Dangers of Myths Replacing History

Historians have revealed that the story Americans long learned about the end of the Civil War was a myth.

by Elizabeth R. Varon via Made By History on April 9, 2025

A group of adult students at Highlander Folk School holding class outside.

The Left Needs Its “Schools of Enlightenment and Revolution”

Throughout the entire history of left-wing organizing in the United States, the building of institutions of political education has been key.

by Nelson Lichtenstein, Steve Fraser via Jacobin on February 9, 2025

Lerone A. Martin

Christian Nationalists Don’t Want Us To Remember the Real MLK

The same Christian ideology that inspired J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI to surveil MLK is alive and well in the Trump administration.

by Lerone A. Martin, Josiah R. Daniels via Sojourners on January 21, 2025

Norma Gabler gives a press conference on July 20, 1977 holding up books in her hand.

The Woman Who Gave Today's Book-Banning Moms a Blueprint

Norma Gabler's work in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s foreshadowed today's campaigns.

by Katie Gaddini via Made By History on November 13, 2024

A historical marker outside Fendall Hall, a plantation.

Historical Markers Are Everywhere In America. Some Get History Wrong.

The nation's historical markers delight, distort and, sometimes, just get the story wrong.

by Laura Sullivan, Nick McMillan via NPR on April 21, 2024

Cover page of an AP Psychology exam

Bankrupt Authority

Advanced Placement testing is "a money-making racket that lets states off the hook for underfunding education."

by KJ Shepherd via Contingent on March 31, 2024

Indochina Peace Campaign organizers hanging out in Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda's backyard in Santa Monica, California, in 1974.

Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda, Capitol Hill Antiwar Lobbyists

In 1974, after years of grinding war in Vietnam had exhausted most of the antiwar movement, Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda came up with a new strategy.

by Michael Koncewicz via Jacobin on March 11, 2024

LaNada Means War Jack with raised fist at Indian Land sign on Alcatraz.

The 1969 Occupation of Alcatraz Was a Catalyst for Indigenous Activism

American Indian tribes have long used activism in their struggle for justice and the preservation of their lands and culture.

via Retro Report on January 31, 2024

Collage of Heather Cox Richardson and the subjects of her book -- FDR, Lincoln, and Trump.

We Have No Princes: Heather Cox Richardson and the Battle over American History

One interpretation presents the country as irredeemably tainted by its past. Another contends that the United States has also tended toward egalitarianism.

by Kim Phillips-Fein via The Nation on January 24, 2024

Jewish civilians who participated in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising are marched out of the city by Nazi troops

What Holocaust Remembrance Forgets

Popular accounts of the Holocaust overlook its irrationality and often disordered violence.

by Samuel Clowes Huneke via The New Republic on January 18, 2024

Black Archives Look to Preservation Amid Growing US History Bans

Matter-of-fact accounting of the legal mechanism of slavery provides insight into American history and the country’s fraught present.

by Adria R. Walker via The Guardian on January 15, 2024

Chairs on top of tables in an empty classroom

Are A.P. Classes a Waste of Time?

Advanced Placement courses are no recipe for igniting the intellect beyond high school. They’re a recipe for extinguishing it.

by Aaron R. Hanlon via The New Republic on September 6, 2023

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