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AP U.S. History the Beautiful

There are many things that I worried about as a 16-year-old high school sophomore. As a junior at Princeton University, most of those concerns seem irrelevant now, if I can recall what they were at all. Still, there have been moments on campus — from late-night chats with my friends to guest speaker talks to simply interesting lectures — that have brought me back to yesteryear. This happened most recently in the tiny Computer Science Building hall at the start of my American Politics lecture.

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We were discussing American traditions of liberalism and republicanism, and the dissonance between them and the historic exclusion of whole groups — like African-Americans, women and immigrants. Our professor posed the question, “How do we understand extensive periods of slavery, genocide, legalized racial and gender inequality and xenophobia within the context of our democratic values?” It’s an important question to answer: how do we reconcile our Founding Fathers’ convictions about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness with the knowledge that essentially no one but white, land-owning males had any of the three?

My mind could have wandered to many different places as this complex issue was presented to a room full of undergraduates, but it jumped immediately to my AP U.S. History course. Although I can now safely say it was one of my favorite and most critical classes in high school, it wasn’t always so. In fact, had you asked me if I was excited to take the course before enrolling, I would have shaken my head and run for the hills. History had always seemed so cut-and-dried, very “first this happened, then this happened, and that’s how we got here!” Furthermore, the class had a reputation of being one of the hardest, most demanding courses in our school’s honors/AP program.

In the end, it was one of the most challenging courses I took in high school. However, I was perfectly okay with this,because after a year’s worth of lectures, class discussions, essays and projects, I realized there was absolutely nothing cut-and-dried about history. Many factors contributed to this new insight, but the most important was the way in which my awesome teacher presented the thought-provoking curriculum of the course. It was obvious why many of my other history courses had seemed so bland: The perspectives from which we had studied past events were so narrow.

This had nothing to do with the quality of teachers I had, but rather the textbooks around which they had to make lesson plans. Textbooks where both important and controversial parts of our history — such as the Trail of Tears, the bedrock of slavery in the agrarian south as well as the exploitation of immigrants in the industry-driven north, the important role women played in the Progressive Era, just to name a few — were glazed over, if mentioned at all.

I understand that, realistically, every period of American history cannot be covered in a semester. I also understand that many of our country’s historical events and ideologies may be too complex to bring into a fifth- or even 11th-grade classroom. Still, I think it would be naïve at best to not realize that there are events that are systematically skipped over in U.S. History courses, no matter the year. An example is the U.S.-Mexican War, the story of the region, Tejas (i.e. Texas) and compulsorily drawn boundaries leading to the geographic behemoth America is today. Recently talking about all this in my Latinos in American Life course, I felt a twinge of shame as I realized it was only the second time I had discussed the topic — the first being in AP U.S. History.

Suddenly I was feeling immensely grateful for the countless number of angles to American history that this high school course had provided me, while being disappointed that it was the only one that endeavored to do so.

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Imagine my extreme disappointment, then, when I found out last week that an education committee in Oklahoma approved a bill that would replace the AP U.S. history curriculum, all because the legislators believe the course paints America in a negative light.

Painting America in a negative light should never be a concern. Every day, the people of America prove their tenacity and will to thrive in the framework upon which this country was built. Furthermore, I would have no understanding of the framework or appreciation for its founders without AP U.S. History — in which my first assignment was to read 1776, a retelling of the birth of America and the perseverance and courage of those who brought it about. We live through the greatness of American history every day of the present.

But just as we live through the feats of our country, so too do we have the face the follies. Courses like AP U.S. History do not paint America in a negative light. They shine lights on all parts of our story as a nation, all peoples who tell the story from a different vantage point. Only when we respect and recognize this divergent recounting can we make our story of forward movement one of unity.

Lea Trusty is a Wilson School major from Saint Rose, La. She can reached at ltrusty@princeton.edu.

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