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Florida Rewrites U.S. History [1]

['Alan Singer', 'Greg Dworkin', 'Excorpflunky', 'Zct.Life', 'Momma O']

Date: 2026-05-20  

In his dystopian novel 1984, published in 1949, George Orwell wrote about a fictional country, Oceania, where truth and reality are distorted, where “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” But Orwell got two things wrong in the novel, the year and the location. The novel should have been titled 2026 and the place should probably have been Florida.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has been fighting with College Board, the organization that writes and administers Advanced Placement exams and accredits high school AP classes because he believes the United States history program is too “WOKE” and unpatriotic and too infused with discussions of the impact of race, class, and gender on American society. Florida will now have its own accelerated history classes with a pro-America spin known as FACT (Florida Advanced Courses and Tests). However, a more accurate name would be something like FANTASY (Florida’s Anti-Historical Nonsense and Tyranny Against Science and Youth).

Starting this fall, Florida students will learn that because the Founding Fathers were Protestant, Christianity shaped the history of the United States, that the United States is a product of Western Civilization, and that despite the existence of 4 million enslaved Africans at the time of the Civil War, the U.S. Constitution was an anti-slavery document. The recommended textbook for this new Florida course of study is Land of Hope, written by a professor at Hillsdale College, a conservative Christian liberal arts college in Michigan.

According to Jonathan Zimmerman, a historian at the University of Pennsylvania, the textbook covers darker periods in United States history such as slavery, the Trail of Tears driving native people out of the Southeastern United States to expand slavery and cotton production, and Japanese internment during World War II, but presents them as “aberrations from an otherwise admirable story.”

The new Florida Framework credits the Judeo-Christian Bible for ideas about liberty and equality and recommends that students in the United States history class read religious texts. The Constitution does not mention God, Christianity, or a Christian nation. A 1796 Treaty with Tripoli in North Africa that was passed unanimously by the United States Senate included the statement: “As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion, as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religious or tranquility of Musselmen (sic).” It is not clear if Florida students will also read James Madison, who was largely responsible for the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Madison wrote “The civil rights of none shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established.”

According to the FANTASY framework, “we must teach our young people to become informed, self-aware, and dedicated citizens of the United States of America — of this particular nation. That requires knowledge of the history of American civilization, as well as its deep roots in English and, more broadly, Western civilization. … The goal, in short, is to help young people become grateful, capable, and responsible members of the society of which they are already a part.” How about teaching students to be curious and critical thinkers with a commitment to the “unalienable Rights” and the principles listed in the Bill of Rights.

Unit 1 has seven topics. Topic 1 is a pretty traditional approach to initial human migration to the Western Hemisphere. Topic 2 begins the mythology. Students are told that “The Crusades were a religious response to Islamic military aggression in Christian territories in the Middle East and North Africa,” rather than an effort to loot the wealth of the Islamic world for the benefit of the Roman Catholic Church and feudal nobility. The Christian Crusaders not only sacked Islamic centers but they also attacked Jewish communities and robbed from Eastern Orthodox Christians in the Byzantine world.

In Topic 2, students learn about the travels of Marco Polo but not non-Christian traders and travelers like Ibn Battuta, Mansa Musa, and Bar Sauma. The topic also introduces the Age of Discovery, “A period in the 15th and 16th centuries when European powers, aided by new ships and navigational tools, began exploring and claiming lands across the globe,” but does not mention that these “lands across the globe” were already occupied by other peoples with governments and their own cultures and civilizations.

Topic 3 ignores the implications of the Spanish conquest of the Americas including the impact of Old World diseases and the enslavement and extermination of native American populations. Topic 4 promotes the claim that “English leaders increasingly connected overseas settlement to national security, Protestant survival, and resistance to Catholic influence, shaping settlement efforts in Virginia,” a claim not supported by any historical evidence provided in the framework. Basically, the British wanted a share of the wealth accruing to Spain, Portugal, and the Netherlands from the Americas, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the sale of slave-produced commodities. Students do not learn that the Caribbean sugar islands were the main focus of British colonization, not the North American colonies. The role of slavery and the slave trade in financing European national development and the Industrial Revolution is missing.

Topics 5 and 6 explore the settlement of Virginia and Massachusetts. In Virginia, “Indians were few in number and resisted being coerced into colonial labor forces. Hence, the colonial labor force was made up chiefly of immigrants from the British Isles and Germany, many of them indentured servants. Beginning in 1619, slaves of African descent were imported, and most worked on Virginia’s plantations.” Conditions for white indentured servants and enslaved Africans are not discussed. “English settlement brought colonists into sustained contact with American Indians, including the Powhatans, leading to both beneficial trade and negotiation, as well as misunderstanding and conflict.” Beneficial to which side? What kind of misunderstandings and conflicts? What happened to the Powhatans as a result of this beneficial exchange?

That the Pilgrims were separatists who wanted no connection with Great Britain is left out. “As Puritan communities grew, . . . conflicts with American Indians (such as King Phillip’s War) challenged their idealism.” It is not clear what “idealism” was being “challenged.” Puritan merchants participated in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The native Algonquin tribes invited to the first Thanksgiving were exterminated in New England during the next two decades during the Pequot wars. The native tribes in the region go unnamed in the framework.

In Topic 7 students learn “Many colonies (e.g., Georgia) were founded with lofty, sometimes utopian hopes that shaped their early institutions and ways of life. Over time, the realities of labor demands, environmental challenges, relations with American Indians, and internal conflict forced colonists to revise, abandon, or adapt their original visions.” Georgia was actually seen as a place to resettle the British poor and debtors as a buffer against the Spanish in Florida and hostile native tribes. The “realities of labor demands” is an interesting way to justify African enslavement.

Unit 2 is the road to revolution and independence starting with the 1215 British Magna Carta which granted Britain’s upper nobility protection from contemptuous monarchs. The journey from the Magna Carta to Common Paine’s Common Sense and the Declaration of Independence takes almost 600 years. The framework emphasizes the role of British Enlightenment philosophers, minimized or left out entirely are rebellions by ordinary people including the British Levelers.

Topic 5 in this unit examines colonial resistance to Imperial Rule with a pretty standard timeline of events. In Topic 6 students are told that the idea that “all men are created equal” originates in the Judeo-Christian Bible, a curious statement given that an estimated three-fourths of the signers of the Declaration of Independence owned other human beings. The framework is also clear that students should understand that the Founders differentiated between “liberty” and “license,” although which acts fall in which categories is not explained.

Topic 7 discusses the Founders views on slavery. According to the Florida framework, “Most American leading intellectuals, regardless of where they were from, believed that slavery was a ‘necessary evil’’ that was ‘wrong in itself and incompatible with revolutionary principles like liberty and equality.’” They only tolerated it out of “economic dependence” and “political necessity.” A funny interpretation given that slavery in the United States only ended after a bloody Civil War.

In one of the Frameworks wildest assertions, the Florida FANTASY curriculum asserts that the 3/5 Compromise allowing Southern states extra representation in Congress and the Presidential Electoral Congress was an anti-slavery measure. This section acknowledges that Thomas Jefferson owned enslaved Africans but claims he opposed slavery. However his Notes on the State of Virginia which it cites as an anti-slavery document is laced with racist comments on the inferiority of Africans. Jefferson did not free any of the people he owned during his lifetime, including his mistress and his own children, and kept his floundering planation solvent by selling people South in the domestic slave trade.

Skipping ahead, in Unit 5, the Florida Framework discusses slavery and the coming of the Civil War and “narrates the tragic unraveling of the American republic as slavery’s ‘peculiar institution’ hardened into the Antebellum South’s economic lifeblood and cultural cornerstone.” Students learn that the “peculiar institution” had some positive benefits for the enslaved. They “built their own communities and culture” and “contributed to American life and culture by building historic homes (Mount Vernon, Monticello, and the White House) and constructing thousands of miles of railroad tracks in the South.” The notion of positive benefits for the enslaved seems to be a particularly Florida interpretation, its Department of Education is definitely a “Peculiar Institution.”

In Unit 5 students also learn how the Bible stood against slavery with passages such as Galatians 3:28, “There is neither slave nor free, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” However, Paul in the Epistle to the Ephesians 6:5 tells the enslaved “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear… just as you would obey Christ.

The terms nativism, racism, homophobia, and male chauvinism never appear in the Florida FANTASY curriculum. Jim Crow is mentioned once and the word capitalism appears only in the final unit. Climate change disappears. Black Lives Matter never happened. Roe v. Wade and reproductive freedom were overturned by the Supreme Court in its 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, returning control over a women’s right to choose to regulation by states, what the Florida FANTASY Framework calls the “democratic process.” Come to think of it, Orwell got other things wrong in 1984. The ruling political party (Ingsoc) should have been called the MAGA Republicans and Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis are the real “Big Brother.”

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