Resources for Teaching and Thinking about Public History Using Lies Across America in K-12 and College
Other K-12 Uses of Lies Across America
- Teachers sometimes assign students one or more of the short chapters from LAA. For example, they might assign the Arizona entry to get students thinking about what Americans get wrong about Native people. The Maryland entry offers a short route into learning the four key ways that slavery wronged the enslaved. The chapters on our war against the Philippines offer a compact summary of what most textbooks omit about this war.
- Appendix B helps students prepare for field trips to historic sites.
- Appendix C helps students critique nearby historical markers, monuments, or other sites. So can reading specific essays within Lies Across America that bear on the nearby feature.
- The essay “Public History After Charlottesville” can help students get in groups to propose a new historical marker for their community or their school. So can “Getting Into A Dialogue With The Landscape”.
Other Resources For Thinking About Public History
- “Revising Bad History,” UUWorld (9/1996, 20-25. )
- “The Shrouded History of College Campuses” at The Chronicle of Higher Education
- “The Sociology of Selected Monuments in Washington, DC, or Stories Behind the Stones,” ASA Footnotes 28 #4 (4/2000), 1, 8
- “A Renaming Everyone Can Get Behind.”
- “Lies across the South,” Southern Exposure 28 ( Spring / Summer 2000 ) : 35 . 22 .
- “Who Controls the Past Controls the Future”
- “Telling History on the Landscape”
- “Half Full? Half Empty?” assesses where America stood in race relations in the year 2000 and noted that our public history still derived substantially from the Nadir of race relations and held us back.
- “Just Because It’s Carved in Stone Doesn’t Make it True” —History Matters!
- “Circling the Wagons” [hyperlink to article you will put on our website, which is now at our Google docs “library”]
- “Dear President Obama: Please Don’t Honor the Arlington Confederate Monument”
- “Separate but Equal Wreaths are Not a Permanent Solution to the Memorial Day Conundrum”
- “Lies We Tell Ourselves”
- “Getting It Right”, address to the American Association for State and Local History, 2010.
- “The Fourth of July”
Teachers’ Corner: Using Lies Across America
Many teachers have told us how they assign students chapters or shorter passages from Lies Across America. Professors in “public history” often assign students Lies Across America – especially its six opening theoretical chapters, a representative selection of specific site critiques, and the concluding chapter. Historic site staff tell us that they found the book liberating and it helped them improve their own sites. Here we invite readers to tell us what use they’ve made of the book and we’ll post some.