This week, after severe criticism, Scholastic pulled a newly published picture book entitled A Birthday Cake for Mr. Washington. The book, which was written by Ramin Ganeshram and illustrated by Vanessa Brantley-Newton, focused on George Washington's enslaved cook, Hercules, and his daughter Delia, as the two overcome obstacles to make a cake for Washington's birthday.
Many critics argued that it displayed an overly rosy view of a slave's life, and the book was deluged with one-star on Amazon reviews.
Many children, and, sadly, their parents, still need to learn that slavery wasn't idyllic, a boon to their family lives, or an improvement over remaining in their homelands. In fact, slavery was often brutal and dehumanizing even when owners exhibited basic kindness. Slaves were often sold away from their families and loved ones with no notice, destroying what little domestic life they were allowed to have; and the severing of black Americans from their ancestors and heritage in Africa is an irreversible trauma.
These are tough facts to confront kids with, especially young kids, but it's better to start with small doses of truth rather than sowing the seeds for "smiling slave" mythologies. Here are 13 (mostly) honest books for young readers that will help them confront the unpalatable truth of slavery, and celebrate the ingenuity and strength of those who resisted, escaped and survived.
Are you on the wrong side or the right side of history? Is there even a "wrong side" or a "right side"? What do those terms mean and why do politicians and pundits use them? Nationally syndicated columnist and best-selling author Jonah Goldberg explains
Seth Dixon's insight:
Just some context for how the phrase is used in the United States and the ideological assumptions about history.
"I cannot deny people's grief," writes the host of the radio show The Takeaway, who works not that far from Ground Zero. "But I think the 9/11-ization of American life has been a kind of poison for all of us."
Seth Dixon's insight:
This is an interesting perspective on how we remember historical events, and how that impacts our cultural and political perspectives.
Armed with a Google search and a theory, a 14-year-old enters the fray on a longstanding historical debate
To her surprise, she got results. The Washington Post's Moriah Balingkit reports that newspaper archive databases turned up dozens of work ads from the 1800s with the “No Irish Need Apply” caveat spanning a number of professions and U.S. states. According to Fried's findings, which were published last month in the Journal of Social History, the New York Sun newspaper ran 15 “No Irish Need Apply” ads in 1842 alone.
Everything's bigger in Texas — including the gap between reality and what state officials want their kids to learn in school, apparently.
The Washington Post reported over the weekend that Texas' new social studies textbooks will not mention, A) Jim Crow laws, B) the Ku Klux Klan or C) the primary role slavery played in launching the U.S. Civil War.
Besides relegating generations of Texas kids to "most exasperating dinner guest imaginable" status, this move all but guarantees the ongoing misrepresentation of what the Civil War and, by extension, the Confederate flag were really about.
This interactive, designed and built by Slate’s Andrew Kahn, gives you a sense of the scale of the trans-Atlantic slave trade across time, as well as the flow of transport and eventual destinations. The dots—which represent individual slave ships—also correspond to the size of each voyage. The larger the dot, the more enslaved people on board. And if you pause the map and click on a dot, you’ll learn about the ship’s flag—was it British? Portuguese? French?—its origin point, its destination, and its history in the slave trade. The interactive animates more than 20,000 voyages cataloged in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database.
"We have a myth today that the ghettos in metropolitan areas around the country are what the Supreme Court calls 'de-facto' — just the accident of the fact that people have not enough income to move into middle class neighborhoods or because real estate agents steered black and white families to different neighborhoods or because there was white flight. It was not the unintended effect of benign policies, it was an explicit, racially purposeful policy that was pursued at all levels of government, and that's the reason we have these ghettos today and we are reaping the fruits of those policies."
Early in April 1919 news of the arrest of Indian nationalist leaders in the Sikh holy city of Amritsar sparked riots in which a mob went on the rampage, killing several Europeans, leaving an English female missionary for dead, and looting numerous banks and public buildings. British and Indian troops under the command of Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer were sent to restore order and Dyer banned all public meetings which, he announced, would be dispersed by force if necessary.
Despite this, thousands gathered in protest in a walled enclosure called the Jallianwala Bagh, near the city’s Golden Temple, sacred to Sikhs. Dyer marched a force of 90 Gurkha and Indian soldiers into the enclosure and, without warning, they opened fire for about 10 to 15 minutes on the panicking crowd trapped in the enclosure. According to an official figure, 379 were killed and some 1,200 wounded, though other estimates suggest much higher casualties.
Seth Dixon's insight:
April 13, 1919. This was a pivotal moment that propelled the independence movement in India, and help Gandhi get more popular support.
Segregated public facilities, including beaches, were commonplace, but even today, the inequality persists
There are few words more closely associated with 20th-century South African history than apartheid, the Afrikaan word for "apartness" that describes the nation's official system of racial segregation. And though the discriminatory divide between whites of European descent and black Africans stretch back to the era of 19th-century British and Dutch imperialism, the concept of apartheid did not become law until 1953, when the white-dominated parliament passed the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act, which officially segregated public spaces such as taxis, ambulances, hearses, buses, trains, elevators, benches, bathrooms, parks, church halls, town halls, cinemas, theaters, cafes, restaurants, hotels, schools, universities—and later, with an amendment, beaches and the seashore.
GeoInquiries are designed to be fast and easy-to-use instructional resources that incorporate advanced web mapping technology. Each 15-minute activity in a collection is intended to be presented by the instructor from a single computer/projector classroom arrangement. No installation, fees, or logins are necessary to use these materials and software.
Seth Dixon's insight:
These GeoInquiries from ESRI are excellent resources for history teachers looking for ways to bring online maps to life in their classrooms. The are designed for mapping novices, so don't worry if you don't have an GIS background.
We are very proud and honored for HSTRY to have been recognized as one of the top resources for education in 2015 by the American Association of School Librarians. We are furthermore delighted to have been recognized as a top resource for Curriculum collaboration. This emphasizes the versatility of our tool and how we are used by all kinds of subjects outside of the social studies scope.
"A new generation of scholarship has changed the way that the public understands American history, particularly slavery, capitalism, and the Civil War. Our language should change as well. The old labels and terms handed down to us from the conservative scholars of the early to mid-20th century no longer reflect the best evidence and arguments. Terms like 'compromise' or 'plantation' served either to reassure worried Americans in a Cold War world, or uphold a white supremacist, sexist interpretation of the past.Legal historian Paul Finkelman has made a compelling case against the label 'compromise' to describe the legislative packages that avoided disunion in the antebellum era."
"Maps bring the horror of Hiroshima home -- literally.
Alex Wellerstein, a nuclear historian at the Stevens Institute of Technology, created a NukeMap that allows you to visualize what the Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions would look like in your hometown. Kuang Keng Kuek Ser at Public Radio International has also developed a version, using slightly different estimates.
Here is what Little Boy, the Hiroshima bomb, would look like on Wellerstein's map if detonated in New York City."
History is the polemics of the victor, William F. Buckley allegedly said. Not so in the United States, at least not regarding the Civil War. As soon as Confederates laid down their arms, some picked up their pens and began to distort what they had done, and why. Their resulting mythology went national a generation later and persists — which is why a presidential candidate can suggest that slavery was somehow pro-family, and the public believes that the war was mainly fought over states’ rights.
The Confederates won with the pen (and the noose) what they could not win on the battlefield: the cause of white supremacy and the dominant understanding of what the war was all about. We are still digging ourselves out from under the misinformation that they spread, which has manifested in both our history books and our public monuments.
Get students thinking about patterns and the 'why's' of history with a focus on the geography and movement behind the historical story. This is the link to some of the digital maps that can help you put history in it's place. For more lesson plans, click here.
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