ABSTRACT
The culture wars, which emerged full force in the late 1980s, were an artifact of a growing backlash against the 1960s cultural revolutions inspired by the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, and the movements for women’s rights and gay rights. This chapter focuses on several flash points in the culture wars: ongoing controversy over multicultural education; an intense battle over the 1994 Standards for United States History; a fight over history standards in the state of Texas; and a controversy over Mexican American studies in Arizona. Supporters of multicultural education asserted that the perspectives of persons of color, women, and the working class had been excluded from the study of history, literature, and the humanities, leading students to conclude that civilization was the product of European males and their culture. Multicultural education was based on the premise that the purposeful inclusion of the stories, literature, and historical perspectives of diverse groups in school curricula.
