Tag: AP U.S. history exam

Revealing the women in U.S. history

Two high school teachers are working to restore women to the narrative we teach ourselves and our students about U.S. history. Read the inspiring full story–and watch the video–on the Harvard Radcliffe Institute website. Then learn how you can help out!

Here’s an overview, also pulled from the website:

Since its founding 250 years ago, women have participated in the making of the United States—but crack open almost any high school history textbook, and you’d find a shocking scarcity of their stories. Faced with this gap, Kristen Kelly and Serene Williams, high school history teachers at Sacred Heart School in Atherton, California, set out to enrich their classes by adding women’s stories.

The pair applied for and received a 2022 Schlesinger Library Teacher Support Grant to do research to write women into a course they were teaching. There are few high school textbooks on US women’s history, so after reviewing box after box of primary source materials at the Schlesinger and discovering unheralded stories of women throughout, they created their own DIY textbook, copying documents and placing them in three-ring binders.

Our two teachers were so passionate about teaching this class that it was just infectious. Everyone in the course could see how excited they were, and we all got really into it to the point where students were volunteering after class. We started writing biographies on women who weren’t written about on Wikipedia yet. And once you started, you just couldn’t stop because it was just this incredible area of history that you’ve never had a chance to see before.

So with their class opening minds back home, the teachers returned to the Schlesinger in 2024, focused on building a case for the first standalone Advanced Placement (AP) course on US Women’s history… Advanced Placement exams, administered by the College Board, are taken by more than a third of all public high school graduates in the United States. But among the 38 different AP exams offered—from AP African American Studies to AP Physics C: Mechanics—never in the Board’s nearly 70 years has one focused on women’s history.

Their effort, the AP Women’s US History, or WAPUSH, campaign, is a grassroots effort fueled by both teachers and students. The campaign is quickly moving forward, but getting an AP course approved and in high schools is no small task.

[from the HP] We’d like to see the day when we never have to refer to “women’s history”, “black history”, “queer history”, etc., because putting a category name in front of “history” inevitably reads as a sub-category–a footnote, non-essential, not important to anyone outside that category. There’s “Women’s history”, a sideshow pushed by a minority population to prove something about themselves, and then there’s “History” which is presented as universally important, almost all-white, definitely all-male, yet somehow objective, value-free, and non-political.

We know we still have to work toward that day. So for now, supporting the effort to restore women’s actions to their rightful place in U.S. history is our mission.

Click the WAPUSH link to learn more and get involved!

Oklahoma attempts to ban AP U.S. History

Over the past 20 years or so, conservative politicians have added criticizing the way U.S. history is taught to their laundry list of complaints about the liberal takeover of America. You know the criticisms by now, most likely, as they have probably been voiced in your own state: students are taught that American exceptionalism is a lie; that American history is a long, unbroken string of racist crimes and hate; that big government is good; and that the Civil War was fought over slavery (for our take on the last one, see What made the north and south different before the Civil War and Amazing Fact! the Civil War was fought over slavery). In Oklahoma, a state House committee has bowed to state Republican complaints that the new AP exam is “unpatriotic and negative” and approved a bill to remove AP funding and create a new U.S. history exam to replace it. “[State Rep. Dan] Fisher said Monday that the AP U.S. History course emphasizes “what is bad about America” and complained that the framework eliminated the concept of “American exceptionalism,”according to the Tulsa World.”

Where to start.

First, let’s laugh at the complaint about American Exceptionalism. We all take it to mean that because of its founding principles, America has a special mission of democracy and justice to carry out in the world, and that mission, which we have always carried out successfully, has ennobled our nation. But that’s not what the term “American Exceptionalism” really means. it was coined by that tireless chronicler of American ways and means, Alexis de Tocqueville, who said:

The position of the Americans is therefore quite exceptional, and it may be believed that no democratic people will ever be placed in a similar one. Their strictly Puritanical origin, their exclusively commercial habits, even the country they inhabit, which seems to divert their minds from the pursuit of science, literature, and the arts, the proximity of Europe,… have singularly concurred to fix the mind of the American upon purely practical objects.

So what American Exceptionalism originally meant was that we Americans don’t care about anything but money. That, to de Tocqueville, made Americans unique—they created the only white nation that did not care about civilization. We would hope that any U.S. history course today would say that this definition of American Exceptionalism is indeed a lie.

But of course the critics mean the other, invented definition that America is unique and perfect. We would agree that our nation’s founding principles were and still are rare; few nations have adopted the mandate to uphold liberty and justice for all that we have adopted. That does not mean, however, that just having those principles is a magic wand to make our every action good. We have not always upheld our founding principles. But as we say in our own little About page,

It’s not [that] American history is the story of happy, happy times and total integrity. The killing and enslavement and oppression are all still there. The difference is that while I, like many other Americans, had previously seen those failings as cynical proof that America was indeed a lie, I now saw them as just that: failings. Failures to live up to the real ideals that this country was really, actually founded on. Ideals that we can and must be proud of.

All the good things in our history have come from Americans who said, You know, this may happen all over the world, but it’s not supposed to happen here. America is supposed to be different, and by God, I’m going to see that America is different. I’m not going to live with slavery. I won’t accept school segregation. I won’t keep women from voting. I am not going to allow the president to be above the law. In America, the press is free. In America, there is habeas corpus. Americans don’t torture. Americans don’t build giant fences to keep out immigrants.

Hey, we’re Americans! We are Americans. All of us. Everyone living in this country. And that means we all have a responsibility to live up to the ideals this nation was founded on. No matter our race, gender, sexuality, nation of origin, native language, economic class, political affiliation, age, religion, or anything else, we are bound and obliged and privileged to make sure the ideals America was founded on are alive and well.

America was founded not by a few wig-wearing white men, but by every American who signed on to the principles of the new nation that was born during the Revolutionary War. All Americans are Founders. Those wig-wearing white men duking it out at Independence Hall took a chance on the average American out there in New Jersey or Georgia or Massachusetts being in sympathy with some very radical ideals of liberty, equality, and justice. Those famous men founded their hopes in the average American, and her devotion to justice and freedom.

You have to teach the failures to uphold our founding principles to make those founding principles meaningful. We’ll admit that some history teachers—and some historians—take a negative approach to the shameful portions of our history by saying they represent the “real” America and are the only true thing about this nation. But most teachers and historians are smarter than that, and present a balanced view that helps students understand what they have to live up to and the challenges that await them when they do that work.

Admitting we have failed is not really negative. It’s objectively true, first of all, and it can be a catalyst for positive action to prevent future failures to live up to our principles. If we teach American students that America has never done wrong, they will see that this is not true because we do things wrong right now, today. If we teach American students that America, like every nation, has done wrong, but that we have a unique national conscience that dogs us to right those wrongs in a unique way, we’re teaching U.S. history. That’s what history is for, after all—to change the future.