In all seriousness, at least back in the 90s we were still tip-toeing around the USSR in history classes because all the books were written in the 70s and 80s, when “The Fall of the Soviet Union” was a wet dream to the West rather than a presumed inevitability. We just kinda ended our history textbooks at WW2, for the most part. Everything after the 1940s was college level material that didn’t get touched.
Far more often, what you’d get in history class was these revanchist takes on the American Revolution and the Civil War. These were the topics that history classes loved to fixate on. You’d spend a full semester dissecting a laundry list of Founding Fathers, all of whom got one flavor of hagiography or another. Then the Civil War got to the point where even die-hard wanna-be Confederates were rolling their eyes.
I will say that my AP class material was focused primarily on the Reconstruction and dawn of the Industrial Revolution, and it was surprisingly good. Didn’t hurt that my senior level history teacher was a heavyweight in the Texas teacher’s union and took all this shit fairly seriously. But she was still very reticent of the minefield labor politics was for a bunch of Houston suburbs failkids. So we got a lot of winks and nudges toward additional readings, without her ever coming out and ringing the “Union Strong” dinner bell.
In all seriousness, at least back in the 90s we were still tip-toeing around the USSR in history classes because all the books were written in the 70s and 80s, when “The Fall of the Soviet Union” was a wet dream to the West rather than a presumed inevitability. We just kinda ended our history textbooks at WW2, for the most part. Everything after the 1940s was college level material that didn’t get touched.
Far more often, what you’d get in history class was these revanchist takes on the American Revolution and the Civil War. These were the topics that history classes loved to fixate on. You’d spend a full semester dissecting a laundry list of Founding Fathers, all of whom got one flavor of hagiography or another. Then the Civil War got
to the point where even die-hard wanna-be Confederates were rolling their eyes.
I will say that my AP class material was focused primarily on the Reconstruction and dawn of the Industrial Revolution, and it was surprisingly good. Didn’t hurt that my senior level history teacher was a heavyweight in the Texas teacher’s union and took all this shit fairly seriously. But she was still very reticent of the minefield labor politics was for a bunch of Houston suburbs failkids. So we got a lot of winks and nudges toward additional readings, without her ever coming out and ringing the “Union Strong” dinner bell.