“…the Trump administration pushes to punish speech it dislikes and to impose its patriotic vision of American history on schools.”
“As recently as last year, many social studies teachers reported success in withstanding political pressure. Now there is growing evidence that the landscape is shifting.”
“Over the last five years, more than 20 states have passed laws restricting classroom discussions on race gender and American history.”
These developments are attributed to the gap between the public and elite ideologies.
“Social studies teachers typically receive much less training from their school districts than teachers of English and math, the subjects covered by state tests. As a result some teachers may have little guidance on how to tackle controversial subjects.”
This post is part of an ongoing series on the war over history to which one should add civics. The starting point is the two year study by the American Historical Association (AHA). That study was the subject of a session at the annual conference of the AHA in 2025 in New York. The 2026 conference will be in Chicago in January, 2026. There were many conference sessions on history education. What follows is a review of those sessions including the abstract and my notes on the presentations I attended or simply the abstract if I did not attend. It provides a sense of where things stood prior to the inauguration of Trump.
Resilience and History Education:
The 2025 K–16 Content Cohort
AHA Session 2 Friday, January 3, 2025: 1:30 PM-3:00 PM
Chair: Katharina Matro, Walter Johnson High School
Panel:
Jennifer Baniewicz, Amos Alonzo Stagg High School
Lendol G. Calder, Augustana College
Anna Klein Danziger Halperin, New-York Historical Society
Samantha Futrell, Virginia Council for the Social Studies
Daniel McDonald, University of Oxford
This innovative program provides a structured experience for educators attending the 2025 AHA Annual Meeting, with sessions and activities planned across all four days of the conference. Details about applying to be part of the AHA 2025 K–16 Content Cohort will be available on the AHA website later this fall.
This year’s theme is “Resilience in the History Classroom.” Our goal will be to use the structure of our conference to create opportunities for teachers across different kinds of institutions—secondary schools, colleges, universities, and museums—to engage, learn from, and collaborate with leading historians.
The content cohort program will include opportunities for focused discussions in a small group setting, opportunities to interact with leading historians, and a welcoming new way to experience and enjoy a major history conference.
Session Abstract
As part of its 2025 Annual Meeting in New York City, the AHA will convene a cohort of educators working in a range of different institutions focused around the theme of “Resilience in the History Classroom.” Details about applying to be part of the AHA 2025 K–16 Content Cohort will be available on the AHA website later this fall.
Both scholars and educators are weighing the strengths and limitations of resilience as a conceptual framework through which to understand historical struggles in the United States and across the globe. Teaching honest history demands engagement with examples of strength, perseverance, and creativity in the face of harrowing adversity. Stories of human resilience in the past are even more urgent as many communities grapple with contemporary pressures that stand in the way of student learning.
This panel, which is open to all conference attendees, convenes historians, museum professionals, and educators for a discussion about the theme of resilience in both historical scholarship and history education.
What High School Teachers Teach about US History
AHA Session 3 Friday, January 3, 2025: 1:30 PM-3:00 PM
Session Abstract
What are American students learning about our nation’s history? Since 2020, a contentious debate over history education has generated outrage, wild claims, and a growing sense of alarm in communities across the country. State legislators, school board members, pundits, and parents have proposed a dizzying array of potential solutions even as few seem to agree on either the root cause or the nature of a purported crisis in public schools. The loudest voices frequently focus on what they believe teachers discuss in the classroom.
But what do teachers actually teach?
After two years of sustained study of instructional materials, state standards, and thousands of classroom teachers, the AHA has some answers. This panel delves into research and data at the core of a major research report published in September 2024. Panelists offer a closer look at several key topics in American history, revealing what teachers actually use to teach their students, what they prioritize, and how they feel about it.
Summary of Part IV of the Report
5th. 8th, 11th grade mean gap in teaching history and complexity
cotton gin mentioned more often than the computer
archetype of the Native – need local and state history
manifest destiny overemphasized – local settlement needed [Trump]
slavery: African plantation and Deep South taught
David W. Blight, Yale University
He called the study an extraordinary document, the most comprehensive since the 1980s, a good news story. We finally have a data point for discussion. It counters the well-funded effort to destroy public schools. He calls public schools – the most democratic thing in America possibly riffing on Teddy Roosevelt calling Chautauqua the most American thing in America.
Blight observed the existence of a national teacher culture. This is partially due to the conferences teachers attend online or in person with teachers from around the country participating. According to the AHA report:
– teachers rule the classroom
– teachers want context
– teachers are interested in complexity and causation
– teachers don’t want to teach ideologically meaning the 1619 Project New York Times or and the Hillsdale College 1776 Curriculum
– teachers are storytellers.
Blight recognized the need for a counter strategy in response to the media-invented panic by the Right. There will be 100 secondary teachers at the OAH 2025 conference in the spring. I attended that conference and will report on it in a future blog. Blight is president of the OAH and figured quite prominently in the conference proceedings.
There have been tremendous strides in the teaching of slavery.
There are classroom limitations on time available to teach a topic.
The report shows teachers a resource.
How in a pluralistic society do we make it a whole society?
There are time, content, pay, and respect issues by teachers.
The Trump election shows failure. Teachers don’t know the content they are supposed to teach.
Brenda Sanders
She echoes much of what Blight said. She notes the pressures teachers face navigating the political and administrative structure. Teachers are undersourced in materials, professional development, and respect.
She recognizes a gap between what is learned and the present. Students may not know what 9/11 is yet alone where they were when it happened.
There is a lack of resources for teaching the impact of global history on the United States.
Knowledge and thinking are not binary.
Teachers need resources that combine knowledge and skill.
– there is a need for teacher development
– teachers make choices every day
How are students learning?
George J. Sanchez, University of Southern California
He observes that 30% of students are Latin in contrast to the demographics. Teachers are overwhelmed by new migrants.
In the teaching of US history, in westward expansion Manifest Destiny ideology dominates. The people conquered are overlooked. They are not connected to other events of expansion. Latinos and Asians are viewed as non-Americans, foreigners. It affects how nationalism is taught.
– Mexico celebrates those who fought the US Army: immigrants bring those stories with them when they become American. Many migrants are indigenous themselves which is ignored when they come to the United States. Why did the United States wait until 1912 to make New Mexico and Arizona states? The relation of the United States to the hemisphere is part of the national story.
There are many undersourced institutions locally – newspapers, archives
Student families can be used as resources – Latinos
The curriculum doesn’t match students.
Whitney E. Barringer, American Historical Association
There is room for improvement but where?
The importance of scope and sequence in the curriculum is a century old!
The intellectual history is typical for the 1920s.
Q&A Teaching in the 21st century
Q&A Teachers need to be activists
David Blight – we need a Sputnik moment and moonshot program.
Assessments can be politicized: Christian Nationalism.
AHA Session 202 K–12 Teachers’ Advice to College Faculty: What We Should Know about Our Entering Students
Sunday, January 5, 2025: 10:30 AM-12:00 PM
What should college faculty know about the students starting post-secondary studies – and our introductory history courses? Teams of AHA members in the “History Gateways” project have asked K-12 teachers this question over the past three years at annual meetings of the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS), the largest gatherings of social studies educators in the nation with 4,000-5,000 people in attendance. We organize an open session at the conferences, focused exclusively on the advice teachers offer to us about the interests, strengths, and concerns their students bring to college classrooms. We then report back to the AHA, sharing what K-12 educators tell us about the learners who will soon begin academic studies on our campuses and classrooms.
Why is the guidance from K-12 teachers important? We know of a disturbing problem in our 100- / 1000-level classes: introductory history courses – designed as “gateways” into our discipline and higher education – too frequently act as “roadblocks” to the pursuit of a degree, especially for first-year, first-generation, low-income, and racially and ethnically underrepresented students. As we reexamine and reframe intro courses, it may not be enough to draw from our own individual interests, departmental priorities, institutional requirements, and disciplinary expectations. What of the circumstances, needs, and “outcomes” of the students in the classroom? Who better to help us understand that question than the educators who have guided students through to graduation and college entry?
At the December 2024 meeting of the NCSS in Boston, K-12 teachers drew on their experience with students transitioning to post-secondary education to help guide our efforts at restructuring introductory history courses in support of success, retention, and completion. Teachers responded to five questions we posed about their students and our own course revisions. Our panel will report on what teachers told us.
Daniel McInerney (Utah State University / AHA History Gateways) will explain the presentations we made to the NCSS — and review what teachers want us to recognize about our entering students.
Amy Powers (Waubonsee Community College) will discuss what teachers said about the learning and skills that new students bring to our courses.
Kelly Hopkins (University of Houston) will share what we learned about the expectations our entering students bring to their college work.
Theresa Jach (Houston Community College) will highlight how teachers view the best ways to engage new students in college-level studies.
Together, the panelists will review teachers’ comments on the strengths and weaknesses of our own introductory course revisions.
State of the Union: How We Teach US History and Why
AHA Session 233 Sunday, January 5, 2025: 1:30 PM-3:00 PM
Chair: James R. Grossman, American Historical Association (He will be the plenary speaker at the annual conference of social studies teachers in the lower Hudson Valley on December 12, 2025.
Panel:
Ashley Rogers Berner, Johns Hopkins University
Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Ohio State University
Nicholas Kryczka, American Historical Association
Jennifer Morgan, National Council for the Social Studies
Jonathan L. Zimmerman, University of Pennsylvania
Session Abstract
In September 2024, the AHA published a major report summarizing findings from a comprehensive analysis of secondary US history education across the United States. This report pushes beyond the heat and noise of recent culture wars to provide a helpful and reliable source of information to parents, administrators, legislators, journalists, historians, and the many other stakeholders invested in the future of public education.
This panel convenes a range of leading experts to discuss the implications of AHA research for the future of history instruction. What is the purpose of introductory history courses in secondary education? How do we tell the story of the United States? And why? What can historians do to improve student learning?
Each presenter will offer a brief commentary on the present and future of history instruction in schools and then engage in a moderated discussion to illuminate points of consensus and constructive disagreement.
Citizens: The Past, Present, and Future of History and Civics Education
AHA Session 302 Monday, January 6, 2025: 9:00 AM-10:30 AM
Chair: Phillip Gene Payne, Saint Bonaventure University
Panel:
Paul Boone, Trinidad State College
Colleen Fitzpatrick, University of Toledo
Penny Messinger, Daemen University
Session Abstract
In 2024 it seems that words such as “republic” and “democracy” have become catchphrases and memes in our raging culture wars, losing historical meaning and failing to inspire patriotism or love of country – whatever that means.
Many scholars and pundits point to our loss of a common narrative, but we propose examining this issue through the lens of the places where Americans learn history through the lens of citizenship. With the culture wars consuming American politics and everything becoming political it feels as if America has been “unraveling” since the sixties, and we have not been able to put the pieces back together. Even more so since we as a society have retreated into our corners of the internet losing the ability to communicate, much less acknowledge a shared history. History and civics, it seems, are in crisis. Headlines from the Nation’s Report Card on civics to the many, many podcasts and YouTube channels promoting history that your teaching hid from you all seem to converge on the idea that history education is not working. As a result, Americans love history but are bored with history classes and our republican experiment is in peril.
As we begin the second quarter of the 21st century, history and civics face serious challenges. How do Americans learn their history? Is a shared historical knowledge necessary for a democratic citizenry? What role do historians, educators, and professionals play in deciding what role history plays in our political lives?
We propose a roundtable session that will address history and civics education from a number of perspectives with the idea of promoting a discussion about what the future might hold. We all know that history is declining in education at almost every level. At the same time, popular history is on the rise. Neither of these is a new occurrence.
Peter Wong, an experienced public historian and educator, will examine the ways in which the National Park Service encourages visitors to reflect upon immigration history. Paul Boone will give us an overview of teachers and education being in the cross hairs during the Cold War and what that might mean for today. Penny Messinger will look at the role of civics in higher education in the context of the crisis of the humanities and trends in higher education. Colleen Fitzpatrick examines the current state of history and civics education as teachers navigate local expectations and trends in teaching, especially towards more project-based assignments. Finally, we will open the session to discussion of the future of civics and the role history might play in it.
The next blog will cover the AHA sessions related to the American Revolution. Ken Burns previewed the documentary which now has been broadcast.
