ABSTRACT
Content standards can be helpful to global history teachers, but “skills” standards are problematic. In 1997, New York State decided to drop a multicultural curriculum focus and replace it with a human rights-centered curriculum. The assignment opened with a brief background: Many government officials agreed with former masters on the need to control rural workers. Often planters themselves or allied with the planter class, they believed that economic strength and public revenue depended on plantation export crops and that workers would not produce those without legal coercion. Students are specifically directed to find a non-racial explanation that seems to excuse racial oppression and racist violence in the Jim Crow era. Students need to learn about its contributions to world history by challenging slavery in the modern era and how it was punished by European imperialist nations and the United States because its people rose up and liberated themselves.
