Missing Links in Textbook History: Labor Before World War I
By Jim Mamer / Original to ScheerPost “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” – Frederick Douglass Canandaigua, New York 1857 When I was…
Missing Links in Textbook History: Racism and Race
By Jim Mamer / Original to ScheerPost Race is the child of racism, not the father. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me In 1963, James Baldwin wrote in “The…
Missing Links in Textbook History: Civil Rights and Human Rights
By Jim Mamer / Original to ScheerPost Human rights invented America. Ours was the first nation in the history of the world to be founded explicitly on such an idea.…
Missing Links in Textbook History: Ethnic Studies
By Jim Mamer / Original to ScheerPost This is the sixth in a series of columns exposing “Missing Links” in high school history textbooks. Previous columns have focused on Indigenous…
Missing Links in Textbook History: Women
In the latest installment of the Missing Links series, Jim Mamer explores written history's outlook on women and the disparity between men and women in textbooks.
Missing Links in Textbook History: Cold War Origins
By Jim Mamer / Original to ScheerPost Paranoia strikes deep Into your life it will creep It starts when you’re always afraid You step out of line, the man come…
Missing Links: The Legacy of Textbook History
By Jim Mamer / Original to ScheerPost It took almost 10 years of teaching before I finally grasped the extent to which secondary American history textbooks fostered misunderstanding and confusion.…
Inequality and Dishonesty Will Kill Democracy
By Jim Mamer / Original to ScheerPost On November 2, 2022, less than a week before the recent national election, President Biden delivered a speech warning against voter intimidation, political…
Celeste Ng’s Piercing Portrayal of the Dystopia in Which We Live
Reading “Our Missing Hearts” becomes an exercise in recognizing the many ways today’s America is already a nightmare.
Jim Mamer: Fake Journalism Is Only the First Draft of Fake History
35 year teaching veteran Jim Mamer explores the areas of history many schools fail to teach and what it means about the state of the world today, on this week's…
Ron DeSantis’ Strategic Delusions
American history continues to be rewritten as the conversation around education heats up.
Censorship: From Book Burning to Racist Babies
On the 40th Anniversary of Banned Books Week, Jim Mamer examines the way in which more school districts are banning books that are narrowly focused on LGBTQIA+ issues, sexual identity…
The President Gets an “F” in American History
By Jim Mamer / Original to ScheerPost For 35 years I taught high school classes in politics, economics and American history. And for 35 years I struggled against a mythological…
Patriotic History is Fake History
Feel-good stories and the series of platitudes studied in elementary and secondary textbooks is no way to teach the young.