This Engaging Differences course is driven by two big questions: What role does History play in American society today? And what role should
it play? The purpose of History is currently a major flashpoint. Debates over the 1619 Project, the content of high school textbooks,
interpretations of the “founding fathers,” and the idea of cancelling, erasing, or rewriting the past swirl in politics, the media, and the classroom.
Who owns American History? will help students to reflect on their own experiences of American History and to understand why different groups
learn and claim different versions of the past as their own. We will examine historical materials from the colonial period through to the twentieth
century and consider the way those stories are told today. Ultimately, arguments about History offer a window into how Americans see
themselves in relation to who and what came before them.