Teaching American History at 250: Hope, Honesty and the Work of Democracy

I teach in a public school. My students come from different backgrounds, political beliefs, levels of trust in institutions, and personal experiences of what America has promised and what it has left unfulfilled. My classroom cannot become an echo chamber, and it also cannot become a battleground. It must be a place where students feel safe enough to think, question and learn. But it must also be a place where honest history is always taught, even when outside pressure pushes educators toward a more sanitized version.

We also have a dense curriculum to follow: more than 250 years of American history packed into one school year. That doesn’t mean we have the luxury of pretending the present doesn’t exist. In fact, America at 250 almost demands the opposite. Anniversaries raise big questions: What are we celebrating? Who gets included in that “we”? What does it mean to inherit a country, especially one built on both breathtaking ideals and heartbreaking contradictions?

This makes me think about Frederick Douglass’ famous speech in 1852: “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”

Douglass understood something we often forget when we plan anniversary celebrations: A national birthday isn’t only a party. It’s an audit. It’s a pulse check. It’s a moment to ask whether the country is living up to its stated ideals, and who is being asked to celebrate freedoms they do not fully have. In 1852, he delivered an Independence Day oration that exposed the gut-wrenching hypocrisy of praising liberty in a nation where millions were still enslaved. He didn’t abandon the founding principles; he held the country to them and demanded it live up to them.

And that is also the work of teaching U.S. history at 250. Not to persuade students to “love” or “hate” the country, but to help them understand it fully. And to understand that democracy isn’t a permanent condition. It’s something people build, protect, and sometimes break. And to show them their agency in all of it.

And that agency matters, because students are navigating a media environment saturated with messaging that encourages simplistic patriotism and distrust of institutions, often packaged as certainty. They encounter attempts to reduce American history to a comforting, whitewashed storyline instead of a complex, contested one. In that context, teaching becomes less about “covering content” and more about building the civic skills democracy requires: evidence, empathy and critical thinking.

What this looks like in practice in my classroom:

• Corroborating claims with evidence: Students practice turning opinions into arguments by grounding claims in primary sources, credible reporting and historical context.
• “Sourcing” as a daily practice: We ask important questions when analyzing documents: Who created this? When? For what audience and purpose? What’s left out? This builds information literacy across centuries.
• History journals (primary sources in the making): Next semester, I’m having students keep ongoing journals to document what they’re observing in real time, alongside what’s happening in their own communities and schools. This was inspired by my historian guest visit from Dr. Yohuru Williams, who encouraged students to start writing down what they are noticing to reinforce the idea that they aren’t only learning history. They are living it—and shaping it with their actions.
• Emphasizing agency: Next semester, we start with the  Gilded Age of the 1880s and end with the modern Gilded Age of 2026. Within this curriculum, I plan to emphasize stories of individuals who organized and shaped history along the way. We will unpack: Who organized? What tactics worked? What changed? What did democratic participation look like back then and how does it look today?

At 250, my goal isn’t to hand students a tidy story, it’s to teach them the skills and courage to face the real, messy one. And to make sure they understand this: Democracy doesn’t run on vibes. It runs on people. Including them.