Florida has long been a laboratory for autocracy. Several of the Trump administration’s most extreme policies were piloted there, including aggressive immigration enforcement, the systematic rollback of civil rights and voter suppression.
Now the Sunshine State is offering a new experiment: a high school history course offering a conservative interpretation of American history and a corrective to the official Advanced Placement U.S. History curriculum, which more than half a million students took last year, and that most historians and educators consider to be ideologically well-balanced. Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis and the state’s education department have attacked the AP course as “woke” and unpatriotic because it examines the complexities of American history including White on Black chattel slavery, the genocide of First Nations peoples and other realities that puncture sacred civic myths such as American exceptionalism and the fantasy that America is, and has always been, the greatest country in the world.
The scope of Florida’s latest right-wing project is ambitious, and part of a three-year campaign, according to a recent report by Dana Goldstein of the New York Times. The course, she revealed, “focuses on the Protestant faith of the Founders, argues that the U.S. Constitution is an antislavery document and recommends a textbook written explicitly to build patriotism.” The story quotes Frederick Hess, director of education policy at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, as praising the new curriculum’s use of primary sources. But even he acknowledged that the new course leans not on criticism but explicitly on how America is a “good, special place.”
This is a polite way of saying that the curriculum is nothing more than right-wing propaganda.
The American right has long targeted classrooms as political spaces where the country’s future can be won by socializing and indoctrinating young people into simplistic notions of “patriotism” and “nationalism,” rather than compelling them to ask hard questions about our history.
The American right has long targeted classrooms as political spaces where the country’s future can be won by socializing and indoctrinating young people into simplistic notions of “patriotism” and “nationalism,” rather than compelling them to ask hard questions about our history, which can encourage them to be responsible citizens who are intellectually and psychologically equipped to challenge the powerful.
This is not an accident. Would-be authoritarians like Donald Trump want and need a passive, compliant public that lacks the agency and tools for democratic governance, so they work very hard to create one.
The impact of Florida’s changes will be felt far beyond its borders. As Goldstein reported, the state has often set the pace for Republican education policy in the Trump era. Other red states will likely administer the new course, along with others in the program of accelerated courses the state has dubbed FACT (Florida Advanced Courses and Tests), which will be, she wrote, “a sort of red-state competitor to the College Board,” which oversees the AP curricula.
Most of the new history course reflects a boilerplate conservative view of American history and society, where cheerleading too frequently substitutes for rigor and accuracy. But it also claims that the Constitution is an antislavery document — and that the nation’s founders, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who both owned enslaved people, were opposed to the institution. Such pronouncements are not merely wrong. They are insidious.
Mainstream contemporary historians view the Constitution as a compromise between free and slaveholding states. But there is significant and respected scholarship that goes much further and holds that the Constitution is a pro-slavery, and pro-Southern, document which protected that vile institution.
The scholarly consensus is clear: The Constitution is not an antislavery document, and America’s founders produced a document that protected the interests of the slaveholding class. But these facts are being buried to construct a narrative that valorizes the founders.
Florida previewed this whitewashing of history in 2022 when it passed the “Stop W.O.K.E. Act,” which banned the teaching of so-called divisive subjects that might make white children uncomfortable because of their race. The discomfort of Black and brown children — who watch their communities’ histories, experiences and reality being systematically erased and distorted — was apparently of little concern.
In 2021, both the National Coalition of History and the Organization of American Historians denounced these laws and the damage they do to democratic life and freedom of thought. “Our nation’s history is complex,” members of the organization’s wrote in a joint statement. “The study of it requires not just a celebration of our triumphs, but frank discussion of our shortcomings, indeed our divisions.” Ignoring those, they said, “stifles that debate and our ability to move forward as a nation,” and impedes healing.
The color line, slavery and the long Black Freedom Struggle are not peripheral to the American story; they are central to it.
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Thirteen of the 39 signers of the Constitution were from the South, and it’s estimated that 25 delegates to the Constitutional Convention owned slaves. The document counted enslaved Black people as three-fifths of a person for purposes of congressional representation — which meant that slaveholding states were systematically overrepresented in both Congress and the Electoral College. The Constitution barred any federal prohibition on the importation of slaves until 1808, and it included a fugitive slave clause requiring that Black people who escaped slavery, even to free states, be returned to their owners. The federal government was given the responsibility for putting down rebellions, which in practice meant crushing slave uprisings and resistance.
Black people were not citizens under this framework. They were anti-citizens, existing outside of the polity. America was a racialized democracy from its inception. It was only after the Civil War, through ratification of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, that Black Americans were written into the Constitution as equal citizens — on paper, but rarely in daily American life.
Florida’s whitewashing of the Constitution and the founders’ relationship to slavery is made more perfidious still by its timing. The Trump administration and its allies are working diligently to end multiracial democracy by gutting the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement and the Long Black Freedom struggle to build a contemporary version of Jim and Jane Crow. And the president is leading this project while hurling racist attacks at Barack and Michelle Obama and other Black leaders on social media.
Real history is much more than just dates, facts and characters; it also encompasses how they are interpreted and contextualized.
In many ways, the Florida course’s more conservative view of slavery and America’s past is history presented as just dueling opinions, instead of as the result of rigorous inquiry, research, theory building and advancing truth claims supported by evidence. Real history is much more than just dates, facts and characters; it also encompasses how they are interpreted and contextualized. As the historian E.H. Carr famously argued in his book “What is History?”:
[History] is a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past… The facts are really not at all like fish on the fishmonger’s slab. They are like fish swimming about in a vast and sometimes inaccessible ocean; and what the historian catches will depend, partly on chance, but mainly on what part of the ocean he chooses to fish in and what tackle he chooses to use — these two factors being, of course, determined by the kind of fish he wants to catch. By and large, the historian will get the kind of facts he wants.
Florida’s history education program is not an outlier. It is a smaller version of the Trump administration’s white racial authoritarian project masquerading as patriotism and American exceptionalism.
As I watch the rapid collapse of American democracy in real time, I keep returning to “The Soiling of Old Glory,” the 1976 Pulitzer-winning photograph that depicts Ted Landsmark, a Black attorney and civil rights activist, being beaten by a white teenager wielding a flag pole. The image was captured during a violent protest against school desegregation in Boston, and as the assailant wields the pole against Landsmark, Old Glory streams from it mournfully.
How would Florida’s new history course explain this photograph? Would it even be taught? And if the Trump administration’s Orwellian whitewashing of American history and public memory succeeds — what then?
I know the answers. They fill me with dread.
A people without history, without context, who lack the means to understand their predicament or the tools to resist it, are easy prey for authoritarians. This is why Florida’s new conservative history course exists.
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