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An interesting essay that discusses the findings from the Southern Poverty Law Center's report earlier this year.  Very related to our conversation on Day 1 about the history our states would rather us overlook.

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A new report finds that the topic is mistaught and often sentimentalized-and students are alarmingly misinformed as a result.

A class of middle-schoolers in Charlotte, North Carolina, was asked to cite "four reasons why Africans made good slaves." Nine third-grade teachers in suburban Atlanta assigned math word problems about slavery and beatings. A high school in the Los Angeles-area reenacted a slave ship-with students' lying on the dark classroom floor, wrists taped, as staff play the role of slave ship captains. And for a lesson on Colonial America, fifth-graders at a school in northern New Jersey had to create posters advertising slave auctions.

School assignments on slavery routinely draw national headlines and scorn. Yet beyond the outraged parents and school-district apologies lies a complex and entrenched set of education challenges. A new report released by the Southern Poverty Law Center's Teaching Tolerance project points to the widespread failure to accurately teach the hard, and nuanced, history of American slavery and enslaved people. Collectively, the report finds that slavery is mistaught, mischaracterized, sanitized, and sentimentalized-leaving students poorly educated, and contemporary issues of race and racism misunderstood.

In what it describes as the first analysis of its kind, Teaching Tolerance conducted online surveys of 1,000 American high-school seniors and more than 1,700 social-studies teachers across the country. The group also reviewed 10 commonly used U.S.-history textbooks, and examined 15 sets of state standards to assess what students know, what educators teach, what publishers include, and what standards require vis-à-vis slavery.

Among 12th-graders, only 8 percent could identify slavery as the cause of the Civil War. Fewer than one-third (32 percent) correctly named the 13th Amendment as the formal end of U.S. slavery, with a slightly higher share (35 percent) choosing the Emancipation Proclamation. And fewer than half (46 percent) identified the "Middle Passage" as the transport of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to North America.

Maureen Costello, the director of Teaching Tolerance, said the research, conducted in 2017, revealed the urgent need for schools to do a better job of teaching slavery. "Students are being deprived of the truth about our history [and] the materials that teachers have are not particularly good," she said. "I would hope that students would look at this and realize that they deserve to know better ... and teachers need to know there are better ways to teach this [topic]."

The student results, which the report labels "dismal," extend beyond factual errors to a failure to grasp key concepts underpinning the nature and legacy of slavery. Fewer than one-quarter (22 percent) of participating high-school seniors knew that "protections for slavery were embedded in [America's] founding documents"-that rather than a " peculiar institution " of the South, slavery was a Constitutionally enshrined right. And fewer than four in 10 students surveyed (39 percent) understood how slavery "shaped the fundamental beliefs of Americans about race and whiteness."

Examining the teachers' survey results might help explain why students struggled to answer questions on American enslavement: Educators are struggling themselves. While teachers overwhelmingly (92 percent) claim they are "comfortable discussing slavery" in their classroom, their teaching practices reveal profound lapses. Only slightly more than half (52 percent) teach their students about slavery's legal roots in the nation's founding documents, while just 53 percent emphasize the extent of slavery outside of the antebellum South. And 54 percent teach the continuing legacy of slavery in today's society.

Additionally, dozens of teachers rely on "simulations"-role-playing and games-to teach slavery, a method that Teaching Tolerance has warned against on the grounds that it can lead to stereotypes and oversimplification. Meanwhile, a large majority-73 percent-use "slaves" when talking about slavery in the classroom instead of "enslaved persons" (49 percent), the latter term of which has gained favor for emphasizing the humanity of those forced into bondage.

The overwhelming majority of teachers who participated in the survey (90 percent) are somehow affiliated with Teaching Tolerance and its learning materials. Costello said this indicates the problems revealed in the survey results could be much more pervasive than the findings suggest. "If anything, I think [this collection of survey respondents] is a group that's more sensitive to issues of race, more likely to confront them in classrooms" compared to the broader teacher workforce, she explained, adding that the findings are "a silhouette of the problem." Similarly, many of those surveyed were elementary-school teachers, which Costello said was noteworthy considering the ability of slavery education in the early grades to form the narrative-the "fake history"-that students carry through high school.

Ursula Wolfe-Rocca, a high-school U.S.-history teacher in Lake Oswego, Oregon, a Portland suburb, has encountered students' common misconceptions-such as the belief that Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, and that the Civil War was really about states' rights. Her straightforward solution is assigning original documents: "Read Lincoln's first inaugural address and you do not find a fiery abolitionist, but someone promising to enforce the fugitive slave clause; read the articles of secession, and you find striking declarations from slave states that their actions are rooted in a desire to protect [slavery]."

Still, Wolfe-Rocca echoed the report's teacher respondents in stressing the inherent challenges in tackling the subject well. As a white teacher, she admittedly struggles with presenting an unsanitized version of slavery that doesn't desensitize her students at Lake Oswego High School to the violence and black pain. "Kids walk into my class 'knowing' about slavery. But their recitation of this knowledge is dull, lifeless, and bored," she said. "It has the feel of something memorized [and] rote, rather than internalized and meaningful." She uses personal narratives of enslaved people to teach the ugliness and injustice of the past while being "careful to keep the rape and whipping to a minimum."

Wolfe-Rocca aims to strike a delicate balance, but she wonders whether she's whitewashing history: "How do we surface the realities of slavery without resorting to spectacle?" Like teachers cited in the report, she finds that exploring the true costs of slavery is difficult but essential.

Further compounding teachers' difficulties is the quality of textbooks and state content standards. Teaching Tolerance found that textbooks generally lacked comprehensive coverage of slavery and enslaved people-the best textbook earned a score of 70 on the project's rubric of essential elements for bringing slavery into the classroom-and state standards were generally "timid," focused more on abolitionists than on the everyday experiences of slavery.

Taken together, the study exposes a number of unsettling facts about slavery education in U.S. classrooms: Slavery is taught without context, prioritizing "feel good" stories over harsh realities; slavery is taught as an exclusively southern institution, masking the complicity of northern institutions and citizens in America's slave-based economy; slavery is rarely connected to white supremacy-the ideology that justified its perpetuation; and slavery is seldom connected to the present, drawing the arc from enslavement to Jim Crow, the civil-rights movement, and the persistence of structural racism.

LaGarrett King, an assistant professor of social-studies education at the University of Missouri, served on the Teaching Tolerance advisory board that developed a framework for teaching American slavery-basically, the concepts that every graduating high-school senior should know-as part of the report's recommendations. As a teacher educator, he said the study fills a significant void.

Students training to be teachers, especially those being educated to teach in elementary schools, know little about the history of slavery, he stated, noting that "much curriculum and teaching around racially and ethnically diverse [people] features a fun-foods and festival-approach to learning." By contrast, King said, the framework provides a guide to delve into topics such as slavery and black history with a thorough and academically sound approach, versus teaching slavery in reductive and superficial ways.

"Can you teach slavery without it being psychologically violent to the children? The answer is no, violence will occur and is expected," he said. "The key is the recognition of white supremacy and [of] the humanity of black people that helps aid in the complexity of the subject."

Relatedly, the study also drew attention to teachers who struggle to have open and honest conversations in mixed-race classrooms about the atrocities of slavery. Antoinette Dempsey-Waters, a black social-studies educator at Wakefield High School in Arlington, Virginia, said she relies on autobiographies to give a vivid picture of enslavement that helps all students in her highly diverse school "walk away with the knowledge of the evil of slavery," as they come to "understand and respect ... the fight for freedom" waged by enslaved people.

Notably, Teaching Tolerance recommends using primary sources and original historical materials to improve instruction, and making textbooks better to reflect a more accurate and inclusive view of slavery.

"It's clear that the United States is still struggling with how to talk about the history of slavery and its aftermath," the report concludes. "The front lines of this struggle are in schools, as teachers do the hard work of explaining this country's history and helping students to understand how the present relates to the past."

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What Kids Are Really Learning About Slavery

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A new report finds that the topic is mistaught and often sentimentalized-and students are alarmingly misinformed as a result.

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Once while speaking to a high school class, I watched with astonishment as a student removed her sweat pants and used a depilatory to shave her legs. Sensing my bewilderment, the teacher motioned me to ignore the distraction. "You have to choose your battles," she explained later. This makes me wonder if a teacher from the ivory tower like me has the street cred to advise teachers in the Kingdom of Nair.

I do teach a lot of U.S. history surveys, though. And I'm noticing something that will interest secondary teachers.

In the first week of my course, students write a two-page history of the United States. I don't allow them to look anything up, which makes students think I am testing their factual knowledge. In fact, I use the assignment to learn what students think the story of American history is. By "story" I mean the basic interpretive frame they use to make sense of the American past.

This assignment sets up a meeting in which we consider common interpretive scripts for understanding the American past. I give the scripts names such as the glory story, the people versus the elites, and high ideals/mixed results. The project of the course is to learn how to distinguish between plausible and implausible historical interpretations while deciding upon a story to make one's own.

Here's the interesting thing. For fifteen years I've been paying close attention to the stories students write in the first week of my survey. The data show two trends. First, the number of high schoolers coming to college who understand the American past as a glory story is declining (to less than 20% in 2010). At the same time, another script has made astonishing gains (over 70% of the most recent essays). It is a frame I call one damn thing after another because it is a mere chronology that makes no attempt to interpret its lineup of facts. These histories remind me of Billy Joel's We Didn't Start the Fire in which the history of the US from 1949-1989 is presented as a mélange of random, unconnected events.

The decline of narrative I'm observing does not strike me as good news. If most students perceive history as having no story, no drama, and no meaning at all, why would they want to care about history? In fact, most don't.

The conclusion I draw is that high school teachers must be liberated from the tyranny of coverage. Leading students on a forced march through a textbook drains the life from history education. We can do better.

Too often, the organizing question for secondary history instruction is "what does the teacher/the textbook/the AP Exam/the state board of education want students to know?" Let's replace that question with "what is the story of American history?"

Getting the question right would be a first step toward creating a signature pedagogy for history. I'm talking about a way of organizing survey courses that imprints on young minds the true nature of historical mindedness. The mark of historical mindedness is not recalling that "this happened and then that happened." Rather, it is a distinctive sort of questioning and a distinctive method of discovery supported by certain habits, skills, and dispositions. The book to read on this is Bruce vanSledright's The Challenge of Rethinking History Education (2011). Vansledright's prescriptions for a signature pedagogy in the secondary classroom will raise the value of history in the Kingdom of Nair. Even for the sans-culottes.

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Once while speaking to a high school class, I watched with astonishment as a student removed her sweat pants and used a depilatory to shave her legs. Sensing my bewilderment, the teacher motioned me to ignore the distraction. "You have to choose your battles," she explained later.

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What is the story of American history?

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Stories We Tell | OAH Magazine of History | Oxford Academic

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Poor, old, American history survey course-the Charlie Brown of history curricula! Is it time to retire this unfavored course, or can it be repurposed for useful

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NPR Article on how slave owners used food as a weapon of control.

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NPR Article on how slave owners used food as a weapon of control.

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President Trump recently described Frederick Douglass as "an example of somebody who's done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice." The president's muddled tense - it came out sounding as if the 19th-century abolitionist were alive with a galloping Twitter following - provoked some mirth on social media. But the spotlight on one of America's great moral heroes is a welcome one.

Douglass was born on a plantation in Eastern Maryland in 1817 or 1818 - he did not know his birthday, much less have a long-form birth certificate - to a black mother (from whom he was separated as a boy) and a white father (whom he never knew and who was likely the "master" of the house). He was parceled out to serve different members of the family. His childhood was marked by hunger and cold, and his teen years passed in one long stretch of hard labor, coma-like fatigue, routine floggings, hunger, and other commonplace tortures from the slavery handbook.

At 20, he ran away to New York and started his new life as an anti-slavery orator and activist. Acutely conscious of being a literary witness to the inhumane institution he had escaped, he made sure to document his life in not one but three autobiographies. His memoirs bring alive the immoral mechanics of slavery and its weapons of control. Chief among them: food.

Hunger was the young Fred's faithful boyhood companion. "I have often been so pinched with hunger, that I have fought with the dog - 'Old Nep' - for the smallest crumbs that fell from the kitchen table, and have been glad when I won a single crumb in the combat," he wrote in My Bondage and My Freedom."Many times have I followed, with eager step, the waiting-girl when she went out to shake the table cloth, to get the crumbs and small bones flung out for the cats."

"Never mind, honey-better day comin,' " the elders would say to solace the orphaned boy. It was not just the family pets the child had to compete with. One of the most debasing scenes in Douglass' first memoir, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, describes the way he ate:

"Our food was coarse corn meal boiled. This was called mush. It was put into a large wooden tray or trough, and set down upon the ground. The children were then called, like so many pigs, and like so many pigs they would come and devour the mush; some with oyster-shells, others with pieces of shingle, some with naked hands, and none with spoons. He that ate fastest got most; he that was strongest secured the best place; and few left the trough satisfied."

Douglass makes it a point to nail the boastful lie put out by slaveholders - one that persists to this day - that "their slaves enjoy more of the physical comforts of life than the peasantry of any country in the world."

In truth, rations consisted of a monthly allowance of a bushel of third-rate corn, pickled pork (which was "often tainted") and "poorest quality herrings" - barely enough to sustain grown men and women through their backbreaking labors in the field. Not all the enslaved, however, were so ill-fed. Waiting at the "glittering table of the great house" - a table loaded with the choicest meats, the bounty of the Chesapeake Bay, platters of fruit, asparagus, celery and cauliflower, cheese, butter, cream and the finest wines and brandies from France - was a group of black servants chosen for their loyalty and comely looks. These glossy servants constituted "a sort of black aristocracy," wrote Douglass. By elevating them, the slave owner was playing the old divide-and-rule trick, and it worked. The difference, Douglass wrote, "between these favored few, and the sorrow and hunger-smitten multitudes of the quarter and the field, was immense."

The "hunger-smitten multitudes" did what they could to supplement their scanty diets. "They did this by hunting, fishing, growing their own vegetables - or stealing," says Frederick Douglass Opie, professor of history and foodways at Babson College, who, of course, is named after the activist. "In their moral universe, they felt, 'You stole me, you mistreated me, therefore to steal from you is quite normal.' " If caught, say, eating an orange from the owner's abundant fruit garden, the punishment was flogging. When even this proved futile, a tar fence was erected around the forbidden fruit. Anyone whose body bore the merest trace of tar was brutally whipped by the chief gardener.

But if deprivation was one form of control, a far more insidious and malicious one was the annual Christmas holidays, where gluttony and binge drinking was almost mandatory. During those six days, the enslaved could do what they chose, and while a few spent time with distant family or hunting or working on their homes, most were happy to engage in playing sports, "fiddling, dancing, and drinking whiskey; and this latter mode of spending the time was by far the most agreeable to the feelings of our masters. ... It was deemed a disgrace not to get drunk at Christmas." To encourage whiskey benders, the "masters" took bets to see who could drink the most whiskey, thus "getting whole multitudes to drink to excess."

The nefarious aim of these revels was to equate dissipation with liberty. At the end of the holidays, sickened by the excessive alcohol, the hungover men felt "that we had almost as well be slaves to man as to rum." And so, Douglass wrote, "we staggered up from the filth of our wallowing, took a long breath, and marched to the field - feeling, upon the whole, rather glad to go, from what our master had deceived us into a belief was freedom, back to the arms of slavery."

Douglass sounds even angrier at these obligatory orgies - he calls them "part and parcel of the gross fraud, wrong, and inhumanity of slavery" - than at other, more direct forms of cruelty.

"It was a form of bread and circus," says Opie. "Slaves were also given intoxicated drinks, so they would have little time to think of escaping. If you didn't take it, you were considered ungrateful. It was a form of social control."

When he was about 8 years old, Douglass was sent to Baltimore, which proved to be a turning point. The mistress of the house gave him the most precious gift in his life - she taught him the alphabet. But when her husband forbade her to continue - teaching slaves to read and write was a crime - she immediately stopped his lessons.

It was too late. The little boy had been given a peek into the transformative world of words and was desperate to learn. He did so by bartering pieces of bread - he had free access to it; in Baltimore, the urban codes of slavery were less harsh than in rural Maryland - for lessons in literacy. His teachers were white neighborhood kids, who could read and write but had no food. "This bread I used to bestow upon the hungry little urchins, who, in return, would give me that more valuable bread of knowledge," Douglass wrote in one of the most moving lines in Narrative.

"This also shows the ingenuity of enslaved people," says Opie, "and how they tricked and leveraged whatever little they had to get ahead."

Today, when one thinks of Frederick Douglass, the image that springs to mind is of a distinguished, gray-haired man in a double-breasted suit. It is difficult to imagine him as a half-starved boy garbed in nothing but a coarse, knee-length shirt, sleeping on the floor in a corn sack he had stolen. As he wrote in Narrative, "My feet have been so cracked with the frost, that the pen with which I am writing might be laid in the gashes."

It is a heartbreaking image - redeemed by one little word, "pen." A pen that he wielded with passion, clarity and irony to gash the life out of slavery.
Nina Martyris is a journalist based in Knoxville, Tenn.

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Frederick Douglass On How Slave Owners Used Food As A Weapon Of Control

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President Trump recently described Frederick Douglass as "an example of somebody who's done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice." The president's muddled tense - it came out sounding as if the 19th-century abolitionist were alive with a galloping Twitter following - provoked some mirth on social media.

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https://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/
Have students check out the tree octopus that doesn't exist but, looks extremely believable at this website.

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The interactive animates more than 20,000 voyages cataloged in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. 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.

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This Haunting Animation Maps the Journeys of 15,790 Slave Ships in Two Minutes

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By the conclusion of the trans-Atlantic slave trade at the end of the 19th century, Europeans had enslaved and transported more than 12.5 million Africans.