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This textual analysis is a collective case study of K-12 United States History content standards in light of how they represent the historical experiences of African Americans during the Civil Rights Movement. The study uses a multi-perspective critical conceptual framework to evaluate the standards for nine state-level polities on both the quality of treatment and the orientation of how African Americans are depicted in the standards. Analysis revealed that the reviewed standards tend to discourage rigorous historical thinking in favor of non-conflictual narrative perspectives that accentuate the historical contributions of African Americans within a framework of linear social progress. This curricular approach is ultimately problematic because it encourages teachers and students to rely on convenient historical archetypes to construct a usable past, rather than problematizing the past and present experiences of African Americans. (Contains 1 table and 1 figure.)

This qualitative textual analysis investigates the ideological lenses through which U.S. History content standards for grades 5-12 for Arizona and Washington frame interactions between American Indians and European Americans during U.S. national development. The study's multiperspective critical conceptual framework interrogates the standards not only on the basis of inclusion of American Indians in curriculum content, but also on the different ways in which this inclusion challenges, problematizes, or disrupts simplistic social representations in curriculum documents. The analysis reveals stark differences between how the respective state education policy makers conceptualize American Indian-European American interactions. In Arizona historical content "is" the curriculum, while in Washington historical content "informs" the curriculum, which is geared toward critical reflectiveness about public policy issues. Both standards documents ultimately fall short in promoting critical thinking about American Indian-European American interactions because they succumb to separate pratfalls of multicultural inclusion orthodoxy. Arizona policy makers tend to shoehorn content on American Indians into a singular and simplistic narrative of U.S. economic, political, and social development, while Washington policy makers tend to construct artificial social binaries to create an accessible and relevant narrative template. The standards documents exemplify the zero-sum nature of curricular politics, wherein we can learn as much about a society's ascendant values from what gets "excluded" from the curriculum as from what gets "included" in the curriculum.

This study is a mixed-methods text analysis of African American representation within K-12 U.S. History content standards treating the revolutionary era, the early U.S. republic, the Civil War era, and Reconstruction. The states included in the analysis are Michigan, New Jersey, South Carolina, and Virginia. The analysis finds that the reviewed standards devote considerable space to African Americans during the formation and development of the United States, but the nature of this inclusion is typically superficial and tends to trivialize the systemic institutional contexts of slavery and racial hierarchy. The standards also typically do not engage students in cognitively demanding historical thinking processes and avoid engaging students in critical analysis of historical racial tensions in order to promote a consensus narrative of social cohesion and national development. While the standards cannot be faulted on the grounds of numeric inclusion of African American names and events, they do not substantively promote critical thinking about the construction of racialized identities and their role in the political, economic, social, and cultural contexts of U.S. history. (Contains 1 figure.)