TAKEN FOR A RIDE - How Rhode Island’s Social Studies Standards Shortchange Students

Western Civilization Absences: Ancient Israel and the Hebrew Bible; Phoenicia and Carthage; the Persian Wars, Greek liberty, and Greek democracy; the existence and the fall of the Roman Republic;37 Jesus of Nazareth; the Barbarian Invasions of the Roman Empire; intellectual interchange between the Islamic world and the Latin West; serfs, manors, monks, or any details of Europe’s medieval politics,. [...] World History Absences: The Muslim conquest of India; Islamic slavery of Slavs and Africans; the expansion of Buddhism to Southeast Asia and East Asia; China’s Ming Dynasty; Portuguese trade and empire in Asia; the history of Latin America after the Spanish Conquest; the African slaver kingdoms of West Africa; Tokugawa Japan; the Middle East between the rise of the Ottoman Empire and decolonizatio. [...] These include: Invented Empires: The Standards refers repeatedly to the “Mesopotamian empire”, the “Greek empire”, and the “Islamic empire”, when no such empires ever existed.42 These could refer, respectively, to the Akkadian or Babylonian empires, to the Athenian quasi-empire or the Macedonian empire, or to the Umayyad or Abbasid caliphates—but the language of the Standards suggests ignorance ra. [...] The Standards 19 the Sassanid empire and the sixteenth-century re-establishment of Persia in the Safavid em- pire.44 The Standards also places the Byzantine empire within Western Europe.45 Confusion of Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny: The Standards appears to confuse the Monroe Doctrine and Manifest Destiny.46 It is possible that this is a politicization rath- er than an error, but the words. [...] The Standards does this partly by assuming a vulgar version of the arguments of the historian Charles Beard, which takes the characteristics of the Founders to explain away the ideals of the documents they created.93 The backgrounds (race, gender, occupation, religion, age, location, and view of slavery) of the Declaration of Independence signatories and the effect that their perspectives had on t.