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The Connecticut state Senate recently passed a bill striking Orville and Wilbur Wright from history, and assigning credit for the first powered flight to Gustave Whitehead instead. Aviation historian John Brown found photographic evidence in March that Whitehead made a powered flight over Connecticut in 1901, "two years, four months, and three days before the Wright brothers." The relevant section of House Bill 6671 reads, "The Governor shall proclaim a date certain in each year as Powered Flight Day to honor the first powered flight by [the Wright brothers] Gustave Whitehead and to commemorate the Connecticut aviation and aerospace industry."...

Are they righting a wrong or wronging the Wrights? The Connecticut Senate passed a bill Tuesday evening that would delete the Wright brothers from history, explicitly stripping recognition for the first powered flight from Orville and Wilbur and assigning it to someone else. “The Governor shall proclaim a date certain in each year as Powered Flight Day to honor the first powered flight by [the Wright brothers] Gustave Whitehead and to commemorate the Connecticut aviation and aerospace industry,” reads House Bill No. 6671, which now sits on the governor’s desk awaiting passage into law. "There’s no question that the Wright...

“A local militia, believed to be a terrorist organization, attacked the property of private citizens today at our nation’s busiest port,” wrote the teachers in charge of organizing the curriculum about the Boston Tea Party. “Although no one was injured in the attack, a large quantity of merchandise, considered to be valuable to its owners and loathsome to the perpetrators, was destroyed. The terrorists, dressed in disguise and apparently intoxicated, were able to escape into the night with the help of local citizens who harbor these fugitives and conceal their identities from the authorities.

The state House voted 42-15 Tuesday to allow high schools to teach elective courses on the influence of the Bible on Western culture and civilization. Tuesday's vote came over the objections of House Minority Leader Chad Campbell. The Phoenix Democrat said limiting schools to using the Old and New Testaments "is going to run into a constitutional challenge." But Rep. Terri Proud, R-Tucson, who wrote HB 2563, said she does not see a problem. She said the language allowing the use of the texts for non-religious purposes has been approved by others. Proud did agree to several last-minute changes, including...

"His Primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it." Sounds like an excerpt from the Obama playbook, right? Or maybe Saul Alinsky? No, this text comes from an analysis of Adolf Hitler's strategies...

Only 35% of fourth-graders knew the purpose of the Declaration of Independence. The news was even more dire in high school, where 12% of 12th-graders were proficient.

NORFOLK The principal of Sewells Point Elementary School has apologized to parents for a teacher's classroom exercise last week that cast her black and mixed-race fourth-graders as available for sale. The apology came after the teacher separated the students from their white classmates and auctioned them, division spokeswoman Elizabeth Thiel Mather said. The exercise was part of an April 1 class on the Civil War. In an April 6 letter sent to parents of students in the class, Principal Mary B. Wrushen wrote: "I recently became aware of a history lesson that was presented to the students in Ms. Jessica...

A textbook distributed to Virginia fourth-graders says that thousands of African Americans fought for the South during the Civil War -- a claim rejected by most historians but often made by groups seeking to play down slavery's role as a cause of the conflict. The passage appears in "Our Virginia: Past and Present," which was distributed in the state's public elementary schools for the first time last month. The author, Joy Masoff, who is not a trained historian but has written several books, said she found the information about black Confederate soldiers primarily through Internet research, which turned up work...

This is insane. Our nation’s schools are going to stop teaching American history. Instead teachers are going to attack “Anglos” (whitey) and praise Castro and Che. IBD reported: Schools Erase America From U.S. History Arizona’s new law that requires the police to ask people to show ID, which was just knocked out by a supremacist judge, may not be the most controversial Arizona law about illegal aliens. Gov. Jan Brewer signed another law this year that bans schools from teaching classes designed to promote solidarity among students of a particular ethnic group. This law bans classes that “promote the overthrow...

American students will learn more about the virtues of free enterprise, Biblical values and the Confederacy's cause, and less about slavery and civil rights in a controversial new curriculum being pushed through by the Texas school board. Members of the state's board of education put the finishing touches on Friday to a new history and social studies curriculum for the state's 4.8 million state school students. The proposed programme, which will affect other parts of the US due to Texas's large share of the school textbook market, has prompted months of fierce argument and protests outside the board's headquarters in...

What started as a third-grade lesson on the history of women’s fashions ended this week with a lesson in intolerance. As a project for Women’s History Month, a teacher at the Maude Wilkins School in Maple Shade planned to have her students wear outfits showing how women’s clothing styles have evolved through history. Boys could wear pants or jeans and explain how those have been common for women at various times. In a letter to parents, the teacher explained that boys would "not have to wear a dress or skirt." But after one parent posted a complaint online, bloggers began...

AUSTIN, Texas — The Texas State Board of Education agreed to new social studies standards on Friday after the far-right faction wielded its power to shape the lessons that will be taught to millions of students on American history, the U.S. free enterprise system, religion and other topics. In a vote of 11-4, the board preliminarily adopted the new curriculum after days of charged debate ... Decisions by the board — long led by the social conservatives who have advocated ideas such as teaching more about the weaknesses of evolutionary theory — affects textbook content nationwide because Texas is one...

All: I'm scheduled to appear on three separate Fox shows tomorrow and Tues., including Fox and Friends twice about the upcoming Texas curriculum controversy. I think I have a handle on it, but I'd especially like Texas Freepers to weigh in, especially with any very recent developments I should know about. Is there still a move to make all U.S. history instruction start at 1877, or has that been killed? Are they still seeking to remove Christmas to make room for a Hindu holiday?

A state board of only 15 people will vote on whether to revise U.S. textbooks to omit references to Daniel Boone, Gen. George Patton, Nathan Hale, Columbus Day and Christmas. The Texas State Board of Education will also vote on a proposal to substitute the term "American" with "global citizen." Mathew Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, is warning Americans to speak up before only eight people, with a majority vote, have a chance to literally rewrite American history. He appeared on the "Huckabee Show" to explain why the board's vote matters to the rest of America. Staver said...

The North Carolina public school system is planning on making a minor change to the US history curriculum that will be taught to high school students; and by minor change, I mean they are going to cut out 400 years of United States history.

Raleigh, N.C. — A new proposal for the history curriculum in North Carolina public schools is causing uproar. Among the biggest concerns is covering U.S. history only from 1877 to the present in the 11th grade. “There's nothing on the Confederacy, nothing on Robert E. Lee, nothing on Abraham Lincoln, nothing on any battle, nothing on reconstruction, nothing on the causes of the war, nothing on slavery. Nothing on slavery anywhere in the curriculum,” said Dr. Holly Brewer, associate professor of Early American History at North Carolina State University. Brewer opposes the curriculum change and says students would not learn...

He may be the president who governed during the Civil War, freeing the slaves, but under a new curriculum proposal for North Carolina high schools, U.S. history would begin years after President Lincoln, with the presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes in 1877.

Change often leads to controversy and that is certainly the case in North Carolina where an effort to revamp the state's education system has some people outraged that high school students will not learn enough American history. The formula for teaching American history has been pretty simple. Start at the beginning and go forward. But a new proposal under review in North Carolina threatens to disrupt that standard teaching philosophy. "If our students don't know what happened in world history, and if they don't know what happened in U.S. history from George Washington's presidency all the way up through the...

From the archives: A brief look at the author of A People's History of the United States and the pernicious popularity of his fractured fairy tales. Notes & Comments February 2008 Howard Zinn's fairy tale On the upcoming television adaptation of "A People's History of the United States." Some projects are born fatuous, some achieve fatuousness, some have fatuousness thrust upon them. Which melancholy comedy best fits the news that A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn’s anti-American fantasy masquerading as history, is—finally, at last, after so many failed attempts—going to be turned into a television show? Somehow...

Howard Zinn, an author, teacher and political activist whose leftist "A People's History of the United States" became a million-selling alternative to mainstream texts and a favorite of such celebrities as Bruce Springsteen and Ben Affleck, died Wednesday. He was 87. Zinn died of a heart attack in Santa Monica, Calif., daughter Myla Kabat-Zinn said. The historian was a resident of Auburndale, Mass. (snip) At a time when few politicians dared even call themselves liberal, "A People's History" told an openly left-wing story. Zinn charged Christopher Columbus and other explorers with genocide, picked apart presidents from Andrew Jackson to Franklin...