I want to major in History but I'm American and our education system has adults believing Johnny Appleseed was a real...

I want to major in History but I'm American and our education system has adults believing Johnny Appleseed was a real person and that the founding fathers were all Christian. How biased and misconstrued is History on the college/university level?

I meant Paul Bunyan, not Appleseed.

Out of all the terrible things they do and do not teach in the American public education system, your biggest concerns are those?

sage.

The fuck is that map even supposed to be?

>and our education system has adults believing Johnny Appleseed was a real person and that the founding fathers were all Christian

No. They don't. It's just a story for kids about selflessness.
In fact, in highschool they talk to you about how everyone was a deist and that one atheist guy.

And to give context, I'm from the Bible belt.

>and
Its the different regions of the US. dixie, rust belt, north, ecotopia, california, carribean and others.

>Idaho is it's own region
What did they mean by this?

>Its the different regions of the US. dixie, rust belt, north, ecotopia, california, carribean and others.

In that case it's massively inaccurate.

Illinois is not "dixie".
NY/NJ and new england aren't part of the rust belt.
There's no such thing as "ecotopia", that sounds like an educational children's cartoon or something.
I also can't understand how Arizona and West Virginia are in the same region, as are Wisconsin and Maine.

It looks like either someone just plopped down colors in random places, or a European made it.

That is absolutely not what that map reflects.

>the founding fathers weren't christians
What? They were muslims or catholics then?

ironically enough, my HS in a traditionally secular area in the north east coast called them Christians. region only has so much of an effect, it seems

Jonny Appleseed was a real individual, certainly his tale is exaggerated, but he did indeed spread apple trees throughout the Midwest.

This. I was taught in high school about Calvinism, Deism, etc. and their influence on the early US, and how the founding fathers were mostly deists in the tradition of the Enlightenment.

Did they mention that the slave traders were blacks and jews?

Slave traders were mostly Arab though

this is what bugs me, I never once heard the Arab slave trade mentioned in middle or high school history, even during units on the middle east and Africa.

Because it's mostly irrelevant. There's no need to explain that African slaves in the US mostly got there because of other Africans or Arabs selling them, because it's only relevant if you're looking for an excuse as to why the slave trade was OK and white Americans are innocent.

To be perfectly fair I haven't yet heard one good reason why slave trade guilt should be considered a viable concept. It's just the application of modern morals to history.
Might as well consider blacks of bantu origins as genociders due to the bantu expansion. Really, the moment you mention morals in any historical discussion, is the moment where you have left history behind.

Same reason they never teach you how much African slaves have taught us and changed our culture. Or that even in the deepest parts of the south there were free blacks and the largest owner of slaves was black. Its all about white guilt in history class. They teach us we kidnapped a bunch of blacks and treated them terribly and use the civil rights movement to justify those claims that it was whites enslaving blacks and treating them terribly.

I agree that holding today's people responsible for things that happened in the past is silly, but the idea that the slave trade wasn't so bad AT THE TIME because, "it wasn't white people selling the slaves, just buying!" is just as stupid. Literally, bring up slavery on /pol/ and someone will give you a whataboutism like "well what about the africans who sold slaves?" or "well what about x people who also historically had slaves?". It's a lazy logical fallacy used too often to deflect arguments.

The fallacy isn't about race but that slavery is bad. They try to teach us that slavery is cruel and unjust when not all slavery in history was like that. But mentioning that makes you sound like a slavery apologist and racist against blacks because apparently only black people were slaves.

Yes, not all slavery was as bad as people think, in fact a lot of slavery was more like indentured servitude where people would sell themselves into slavery for a while, work and receive room/board/food, then it'd be over after a period and they'd receive pay or have a debt forgiven or something.

But that's mostly not what applies to America. Indentured servitude did of course exist, mostly for poor people to afford the passage from the Old World. But the chattel slavery practiced first on natives then Africans where landowners owned their slaves, and their slaves' children, in perpetuity, and could basically do whatever they want to them, is not the same as that. It's one of the worst kinds of slavery and the fact that it happened in America and so relatively recently in history makes it relevant to American history courses.

>but the idea that the slave trade wasn't so bad AT THE TIME because, "it wasn't white people selling the slaves, just buying!" is just as stupid
Agreed. The slave trade wasn't so bad at the time because at the time slavery wasn't considered as bad as it is now. It has nothing to do with one's role in the slave trade.
On the other hand, there's nothing really wrong about people pointing out the partiality and hypocrisy of people supporting the concept of white guilt either. People saying "everyone is guilty" aren't wrong, and they're not deflecting either if they say it within the context of people trying to get reparations, because it's a valid retort (shared responsability means one party can't be expected to indemnify the other after all).

Teaching wrongness or rightness belongs in a political class not history.

I would argue that since philosophy and politics don't really have their own classes in primary/secondary schools, it needs to fall to other classes to teach those things, e.g. English/literature/history classes. This is how most curricula are set up nowadays.

Twisting history to push am certain morality of it or political agenda on subjects is not a history. When you don't fully teach history and only discuss the subjectively good or bad things in a subject, you aren't teaching actual history.

I'm not saying slavery is right, but I'm saying it should be justly taught and not only taught of how wrong it is. There's no bias in history. You teach the subject and that's it. Whatever opinion or philosophy you have of it is beside the point. You shouldn't teach history with a specific morality in mind.

What I'm saying is that when you include morality and philosophy in history and teach in a such a manner, people will completely dismiss anything that opposes it. US history teaches kids that slavery was white vs minorities and cruelty and racist when that isn't even true. And when you point out actual facts and history about blacks being involved in this or that, it gets dismissed and you're a slavery apologists. You're a racist. How dare you. It isn't even history anymore.

I would argue that teaching wrongness or rightness is not the job a politics classes either. There's really no space for those concepts outside of ethics classes.

At the college level you will study primary sources and PROVE historical claims.

This isn't highschool. They will not tell you general bullshit.

Source: Working on my masters.

Any uni? Was thinking of attending University of Richmond and majoring in cognitive science with a minor in history.