Running list of nonsense in history education contexts

Super not-thorough...

• Some version of: "Hitler’s gun control policies were a contributing factor in the Holocaust"
  • For an articulation of this point of view, here's a book review from the Mises Institute: "[S]ystematic creation and manipulation of firearms registration and regulations, coupled with the decimation of individual citizen’s rights, enabled Hitler’s dictatorship and the slaughter of millions of innocent Jews and citizens of Nazi-occupied countries...." I guess if you wanted more of that sort of thing, you could read the book reviewed.
  • Sample counter-point: "No, gun control regulation in Nazi Germany did not help advance the Holocaust" (Politifact)
  • And if you have a long attention span: On Gun Registration, the NRA, Adolf Hitler, and Nazi Gun Laws: Exploding the Gun Culture Wars (A Call to Historians) (Forham Law Review)
• Characterizing enslaved Africans as 'immigrants' and/or 'workers' and/or 'laborers'
  • Probably the most salient example comes from a McGraw-Hill world history textbook in 2015 – see the publisher's Facebook post from the time.
  • Here's an NPR article about the textbook page under discussion; you really need to look at the page in question and read the whole thing to get a sense of how messed up this was: Why Calling Slaves 'Workers' Is More Than An Editing Error (NPR)
  • Another article, this time with a video: McGraw-Hill to rewrite textbook after mom's complaint (CNN)
  • And if you're interested in the mother in question, here's a profile of Roni Dean-Burren from the University of Houston, where she was working towards a doctorate in curriculum & instruction (Go Cougars!)
• 'Black Confederates' – black soldiers served in the Confederate army
  • Description of the issue, plus its dismantling: Virginia 4th-grade textbook criticized over claims on black Confederate soldiers (Washington Post) (Again, note the role played by an alert mother! Who happened to be an academic!)
• "Slavery was going to die out by itself; the Civil War was unnecessary"
  • The clearest statement of this I've ever seen is from Andrew Napolitano; I unfortunately can't link to the video any more, but here is a quote: "At the time that he [Lincoln] was the president of the United States, slavery was dying a natural death all over the Western world. It had just been expired by legislation in England. It had just died a natural death; that is, it was no longer economically feasible in Puerto Rico and Brazil, and the southern plantation owners were on the cusp of it dying here. Instead offer allowing it to die, or helping it to die, or even purchasing the slaves and then freeing them — which would have cost a lot less money than the Civil War cost — Lincoln set about on the most murderous war in American history." (source, plus more commentary here:

    Why Some Americans Just Can’t Handle The Truth About Slavery (That Devil History))

  • De-bunking: The census data itself is the best proof I can offer. The percentage of the Deep South population that was enslaved rose pretty consistently, reaching a high of 57% in South Carolina in 1860...not exactly an institution that was dying out. If you'd like to investigate yourself, here is a map I put together with help from Dr. Julie Oltman.