Women for Progress Radio Network: History Matters with Angela Stewart

Whatever we have lost, forgotten, forgone or been stripped of, can be reclaimed, revived, preserved and perpetuated.According to Dr. Timothy Snyder, Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, “This spring, memory laws arrived in America. Republican state legislators proposed dozens of bills designed to guide and control American understanding of the past. As of this writing, five states (Idaho, Iowa, Tennessee, Texas and Oklahoma) have passed laws that direct and restrict discussions of history in classrooms. The Department of Education of a sixth (Florida) has passed guidelines with the same effect. Another 12 state legislatures are still considering memory laws. . . .  It is a perverse goal: Teachers succeed if students do not understand something.