Bye, Bye, American History
Professors and historians urged opposition to the College Board’s new curriculum for teaching AP U.S. History.
‘Washington Crossing the Delaware’ by Emanuel Leutze, 1851. PHOTO: THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART
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The memory hole, a creation of George Orwell’s novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” was a mechanism for separating a society’s disapproved ideas from its dominant ideas. The unfavored ideas disappeared, Orwell wrote, “on a current of warm air” into furnaces.
In the U.S., the memory-sorting machine may be the College Board’s final revision of the Advanced Placement examination for U.S. history, to be released later this summer.
The people responsible for the new AP curriculum really, really hate it when anyone says what they are doing to U.S. history is tendentious and destructive. In April, the nine authors of the “curriculum framework” published a relatively brief open letter to rebut “uninformed criticisms” of the revision.