The LA times has sunk to new lows allowing garbage like this to be printed. It's little wonder the liberal state of california is going under. I say give it back to Mexico and good riddance.

Knowing the ideology of both sides of a conflict helps students to understand its history.

It is not so hard to look up the date of the Emancipation Proclamation to see it was made in the middle of the war when the Union feared it might lose the war and not before or near the beginning of the war.

That is how history has to be read, by dates and actions.
The war started over free trade of cotton and blocking ports.
That is what the dates and actions state.

Obviously you can make stuff up since you did, at length, and very poor propaganda it is.

Bruce:

No, the Texas school board has sunk to a new low by allowing these idiotic anti-American texts to be forced on students just for the purpose of pushing a pro-GOP agenda. Why do you hate free speech?

The reason the "liberal" state of California is going under is because of the Republican Govenator. The reason that Tex-ass has the highest high school dropout and teen pregnancy rates in the US is because of their idiotic "education" system (or lack thereof).

I would say give Tex-ass back to Mexico and good riddance (you practically have to speak Spanish to live there anyway), but sadly I live in Texas for the time being. Actually, keep Austin and just annex the rest to Mexico and let the Republican and evangeli-culists continue to degenerate it with their amoral garbage.

What did our Founding Fathers think?
“Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man.” Thomas Paine
"Religions are all alike - founded upon fables and mythologies." - Thomas Jefferson
“Lighthouses are more helpful than Churches”, Benjamin Franklin

This piece is typical anti-Southern hate propaganda.
Jefferson Davis was an honorable man and a patriot-a U.S. army veteran, senator, and secretary of war-that hoped to preserve the old union if at all possible with sovereign states' rights intact as constitutionally-guaranteed.
He was no "traitor". He was loyal first to his own state when it exercised the right of secession in the face of Northern sectional hostility and dominance of the U.S. government.
Pres. Davis' views of the American republic and constitutionalism were much like those of the founding fathers, quite unlike Lincoln's policies of "Big Government" centralized coercion, his criminal trampling of the constitution.
Good for the Lone Star State in remembering the Confederate part of their proud history without apology and totally caving to the one-sided bigotry of modern politically-correct "history".
I'm a Kentuckian proud to say I live just a few miles from the birthplace of a noteworthy Southerner and American: President Jefferson Davis.

God Bless Texas and the South!

Its sad to watch people gloss over the role of black slavery in the cultural and political history of the south and then refer to the leaders of it as honorable men.

It was a wretched time of our history and more resembled a feudal state than a Democracy. The pro-Confederacy propagandists have been very effective, and there was a time in our history when the white north shared their point of view. But that time is gone and we should have progressed. Some of us haven't.

The question Texas was facing was not the straw man you present that Jeff Davis was a good man but whether he existed at all. The idea was to remove a lot of "dead white guys" and replace them with people who are more politically correct.

@ Allen, Allen, Allen... What a load of propaganda! Nice touch, trying to bring in the Nazi's. Shock Education. Naomi Klein would be proud of you.

So, since you brought up the subject, let's talk what exactly went on in Texas. It'll help others to think about it some more...

Actually, What the Texas Board of Education has done by correcting "revision" history, is correct the record which frustrated the liberal progressive wing of the modern anti-globalization movement.

This movement has it's roots in the traditional Communist movement prior to 1956, and is critical of the globalization of capitalism. The movement is also commonly referred to as the global justice movement, alter-globalization movement, anti-corporate globalization movement, or movement against neoliberal globalization.

Corresponding terms in other languages are mouvement antimondialiste (French), globalisierungskritische Bewegung (German), Movimento no-global (Italian), or Movimento anti-globalização (Portuguese).

Participants base their criticisms on a number of related ideas. What is shared is that participants stand in opposition to the unregulated political power of large, multi-national corporations and to the powers exercised through trade agreements and deregulated financial markets.

Specifically, corporations are accused of seeking to maximize profit at the expense of sabotaging work safety conditions and standards, labor hiring and compensation standards, environmental conservation principles, and the integrity of national legislative authority, independence and sovereignty. Recent developments, seen as unprecedented changes in the global economy, have been characterized as "turbo-capitalism" (Edward Luttwak), "market fundamentalism" (George Soros), "casino capitalism" (Susan Strange), "cancer-stage capitalism" (John McMurtry), and as "McWorld" (Benjamin Barber).

Many anti-globalization activists generally call for forms of global integration that better provide democratic representation, advancement of human rights and more egalitarian states.

What is necessary for a population to accept this style of Obama led socialism, is the destruction of the historical record in regard to individual achievement; the destruction of the historical record of in regard to the individual centered philosophy of western civilization; the destruction of the record of the evolution of the body of law, in western civilization, that protects the individual from the tyranny of the state; the destruction of the record of the enlightenment and it's great thinkers; the destruction of the record of the successful revolution to democracy and economic empowerment of the individual; and culminating in the destruction of the record of the success of United States and why it is unique in the history of the world.

Here's the real problem. You get a group of middle school and high school teachers, flirting with leftist movements in college during the 60's and 70's, failing to get PhD's, with no skills to do anything else, becoming middle school and high school teachers. They have nothing better to do than get together at night, smoke a little weed, think about the glory of old times and what they thought there we going to do when they grew up, and then decide to make one last romantic push to change the world, while striking out against a world they couldn't compete in.

The Texas Board of Education had to step in and bring the system back to what it's supposed to do: Teach history, to provide students with an understanding of their world, grounded in reality, to prepare them for the reality they need to face in their real lives.

Was the Civil War "about" slavery? No! It was cotton shipment blockades and taxes on South Carolina...it was purely economic and political (i.e. Northern Aggression). Jefferson Davis? An american hero! Of course, if you question this nonsense you get the standard knee-jerk responses: this is "anti-Southern" propaganda...or we're just CORRECTING the liberal/Commie influenced teachings that has DOMINATED the curriculum for so long, or why don't you live in/take a look at your failed SOCIALIST system (because obviously that is your preferred political system!).

Yeah, let's discuss Jefferson Davis...and the NUANCES of slavery. Great idea!

There are several points to be made about this. Currently a large portion of history follows a formula that is described by this quote "The history that you read, is history as written by the winners." The problem with history today is that one side of history is ever addressed. This is more necessary in early childhood education, but once in high school, it is imperative that both sides of stories be taught. For example: The United States dropped two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but what many books don't teach is that there we NO military targets in the region, and a tremendous majority of those killed were civilians.

By increasing teaching of religion's influence in this nation's founding, it is equally important that they also state that the founding fathers were NOT christian and founded this nation as a Constitutional Republic and not as a Theocracy similar to what was in Britain at the time of the Puritan's departure.

Slavery was an issue in the South's secession, but a larger majority of the reasoning for secession was based on states rights, smaller federal government, free economy, etc.

And my biggest problem with the revision of the text books is their mentioning of Reagan. Yes he was a president who took over from an ineffective Carter, he was able to get Gorbachev to tear down there Berlin wall, but in his "attempts" to make our government smaller, Reagan tripled its size, lowered all taxes for the wealthy, which caused them to pay 28% as comparable to the 33% the rest of America was paying. These are important points.

I do not have a problem with the teaching of conservative political philosophy but they cannot leave out liberal political philosophy either. But when I say conservative and liberal, I do not mean Republican or Democrat, I mean the teaching of Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, Tocqueville, Marx, Smith, Machiavelli, the basic founders of political thought, not the rhetoric that it spoken by Obama, Beck, Pelosi, Reid, Hannity, O'Rilley, Palin, Olbermann, or Maddow .

Just what is it about those naughty Liberals? Why do they always slant American history for their own selfish purposes? Or do they? Could it possibly be that history naturally ends up being viewed from the progressive angle? After all - what is history? It is the story of human progress! "Progressive" and "Progress". (You see where I'm going with this, don't you?) Conservative causes may look fine and dandy when viewed through a contemporary prism. But they always - without exception - look foolish, even totalitarian, when viewed through the objective lens of 20/20 historical hindsight. If you don't believe me, look up every Conservative cause in American history - starting with slavery!

Think about it: Who championed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security? It was the Liberals. Who was it that fought vehemently to destroy those programs? It was the Conservatives. In 1919 Woodrow Wilson literally fought to the death to include America in the League of Nations. It was the right wing fringe of American politics (Republican and Democrat) that destroyed any chance of the League succeeding. Had it come into being, it is very possible the carnage of the second world war might have been avoided. Thanks to the Conservatives we'll never know.

And lets not forget those damned, bleeding heart abolitionists. Although the complexities of America's sociology have changed much since the nineteenth century, by the standards of today they were Liberals all. The south went to war against the United States government for no other reason than to conserve the "peculiar institution" of slavery. These aren't mere political opinions on my part. These are inarguable historical facts, boys and girls. A group ideologues cannot represent fantasy as fact in order to serve their own weird political agenda. The Nazis tried that seventy years ago. It didn't work then. It's not going to work now.

http://www.tomdegan.blogspot.com

Tom Degan
Goshen NY