Nearly all historians of the United States have identified slavery as a central factor in the making of the modern nation and argue that its brutal legacy of racism remains deeply embedded in Amer- ican society down to the present day. Although there is no way to understand the nation’s past without reckoning with the multi- faceted impact of slavery, many Americans clearly find the subject disturbing and out of step with images of the nation emphasizing freedom and equality. Indeed, recent controversies over middle school and high school social studies curricula and over textbook adoptions around the country have centered on their presentation of slavery and its role in American life. Despite a scholarly con- sensus on the central role of slavery in causing the Civil War, for example, state education officials in Texas only recently adopted curricular standards acknowledging that fact. One widely used high school textbook produced by a mass-market publisher, more- over, was challenged by parents in 2015 for using the generic and sanitized word “workers” to describe Africans kidnapped from their homeland and forced to labor under terrible conditions in the Americas. Most recently, conflict over the presence of monuments to leaders of the overtly proslavery Confederate States of America has generated an intense debate in the country over the realities of life for African Americans on the plantations of the Old South. INTRODUCTION
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