Who Should Decide How Students Learn About America’s Past?: Some politicians want to get rid of the AP U.S.-history curriculum because it paints a cynical picture of the country's backstory.
Americans want to be descendants of a noble people, explained David Blight, a U.S.-history professor and the director of Yale’s Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. Americans want to be the people who emancipated the slaves—not the people who enslaved them. "But history’s job isn’t to make people feel happy about themselves or their culture," he said. "That’s why we have religion, churches, and community organizations. That’s why we have rabbis and psychologists, not historians."...