Teaching the US history in schools and college

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

I fear we are leaping from one extreme to the other here and that is just as bad.

You don't replace the Lost Cause with the 1619 project and think you are doing a service to an accurate and instructive portrayal of events.

Slavery needs to be taught from start to finish. Motivations and interest groups emphasized as the basis for policies as opposed to focusing on the policies themselves (This is how we get fertile ground for nonsense like the Party Flip Myth), or accepting the proponents as principled advocates and not expedients of select interests that they are in fact.

I am deeply disturbed by the level of myth that still resides in our curriculum and it is a daunting prospect as someone who has contemplated an education profession in history to have to worry about constantly fighting a two front war against the conspiracy theorists and nonsense like the Lost Cause on the one side, and the revisionists on the left be it 1619 or reductionism to everything being about class. The ironic think was one of the most effective destroyers of party flip myth and the "Hamilton and Federalists as good clean Liberals" was Mechaman who approached it from a left/class based perspective and he was brutally effective in portraying the Federalists as a Party of planters, speculators, merchants, societal elites and nativist impulses by dominant English population against at that point largely immigrants from the Celtic Rim and Ireland. Class is an important consideration, but it is one of many.

Of course there is the need to intertwine other disciplines, a value I learned in 5th grade when I cringed at set of class projects on a book we read set in the 1760s and they colored an "army uniform" in modern camouflage.

It is also necessary to include an understanding of economics and this topic came up on a Youtube video a couple weeks back I think the one where Tom Richey reacts to the Praeger U video on the Civil War being caused by slavery. In all the emphasis on the North being industrial while the South was agricultural, it gets lost that the North outproduced the South on agricultural food products. There are two reasons behind this, as a lower percentage of a high enough population can exceed a high percentage of a lower population. (40% of 25 Millions is 10 Mil, while 80% of 9 Million is 7.25 Million). The other reason of course is that a lot of the South's agriculture was tied up by cash crops and their is a video by "Have History Will Travel" that makes an interesting point about how tobacco farmers in NC and other places may well have cost the South the war. Probably exaggerated in its impact, but it helps the make the point that you cannot eat tobacco or cotton.

There is also of course the fact that constructions like the Erie Canal and later East-West Railroads from NYC to Chicago ended up diverting commerce of the Lower Midwest towards New York and opened up settlement as viable in the Upper Midwest. This demographic and economic shift is vital to the Civil War and it makes both the political map that Lincoln won possible and provided the important resources with which to win the war. This is never taught or explained in context as the Erie Canal is taught chapters ahead of the Civil War with no over connections made.

That doesn't get into religion, cultural considerations etc. History is a product of all of these forces acting on a particular point in time.