Talking to my mother and other older folk, there seems to be a gradual change in how history has been taught. Doubtlessly unevenly distributed, but public school history in many places has developed to emphasize the contours and details of the societies, rather than dates and places. I remember having an older History teacher in Middle School, and he gave us just the worst kind of shite, the kind of rote memorization that put even me to sleep. All the younger teachers, and all my teachers with ‘Dr.’ in their title, taught a much more engaging form of history.

I have always enjoyed history, and I distinctly remember being disappointed in history classes because history was taught as chunks that seemed almost unrelated from each other. It was difficult to get a feeling for how the chain of cause and effect happened, or get a narrative sense of history because each chapter would be its own miniature little topic. And if time was running thin in a school year, certain chapters were sped through at an even more breakneck pace than normal.

In high school the history class seemed to jump from just after the American Revolution, to westward expansion for like a chapter, to the start of the Civil War, to a dabble of Reconstruction, jump to WW2 (which covered basically just Pearl Harbor and the atomic bomb), and then to the Civil Rights era.

The context and connection between all of those things was completely flashed over in the name of supposedly covering all of that time. It would have been impossible to connect with any of what was happening because as a student you were too busy dealing with the firehouse of mandatory facts to get through the tests.