Should history be taught from the “perspective” of marginalized groups?

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Shua has got the right idea on this, I think. Particularly in a pluralistic society like the U.S., it makes little sense to teach American history from the perspective of a single ethnic group —especially given that the majority group today (whites) were hardly monolithic 300 or even 100 years ago. If you want to understand the history of the United States, you have to look at it from multiple perspectives, or you frankly will not understand the complex social, cultural, and political forces at play.

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

Americans can learn about slavery from an American perspective (without spending 3/4 of the lesson learning about the Bantu societies and cultures from which slaves were largely taken) while still acknowledging it as a stain on our nation's history.

I don't think anyone is suggesting that. To my understanding, anyways, teaching history from the perspective of "marginalized groups" in this particular example would mean looking at slavery from the perspective of slaves. While it shouldn't be the only perspective considered (slaveowners and abolitionists are of course extremely important viewpoints to consider as well), I think it would be ... well, frankly bizarre to teach a course on American slavery without ever looking at primary sources created by slaves. Likewise, it would be an odd choice to talk about immigration in the late nineteenth century without considering the accounts of those immigrants. American history is more than just the history of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

(N.B. After all, depending on where you were in the South, black slaves were the majority group or very near to it —it has always struck me as strange that "Southern heritage" almost always means white Southern heritage when for most of US history, anywhere from a third to three-fifths the population of the South was black, depending on the state.)

[Unconditional Surrender Truman]

I don't know that I agree that the only or even the most important function of history education is to "explain how things got to be the way they are today," but it is certainly a common and not unreasonable position. And I agree that ruminating at length on the day-to-day lives of historical persons (whether they are slaves, white immigrants, Civil War soldiers, etc.) should not be the focus of the curriculum in a survey course. You simply cannot accurately teach the history of the "political forces that led to [slavery's] abolition" without including the perspectives of slaves and abolitionists (white and black), however. Historically, accounts by those who had escaped slavery were critical to building support for abolition: I think it would be very reasonable for a history teacher to assign selections from the autobiography of Frederick Douglass, for instance —far from being a mere record of beatings and other cruelties, Douglass' book was a profoundly influential political document precisely because it was written from the perspective of a "marginalized group."

Moreover, the purpose of history education is not merely to relate a sequence of events that lead us to the present day (though that is important) but to teach students to critically examine sources that describe the same event from different perspectives and to consider how the author's biases influence their account. This is a skill that we find sadly lacking in many present-day Americans, with the result that they are easily misled by dishonest reporting and misinformation. If history is only taught from one perspective (whether it is that of the dominant social group or "marginalized people"), many students will get the impression that there is no difference between that perspective and the truth, which is hardly conducive to the future of democracy. A free country needs citizens who can think for themselves, and learning to analyze sources told from many different points of view is important preparation for citizenship.