Teaching Hard History Podcast

Learning for Justice is relaunching the Teaching Hard History podcast series with host Hasan Kwame Jeffries, Ph.D., to resist current efforts to erase and alter our nation’s history. 

So what is hard history? In the short video, Confronting Hard History (TEDx Talks Ohio State University), Dr. Jeffries explains: “[American slavery is] hard history because it’s difficult to imagine the kind of inhumanity that leads one to enslave children to make bricks for your comfort and convenience. It’s hard history because it’s hard to talk about the violence of slavery — the beatings, the whippings, the kidnappings, the forced family separations. It’s hard history because it’s hard to teach white supremacy, which is the ideology that justified slavery.” He emphasizes that “If we don’t remember the past, we will continue it,” and encourages us to “disrupt the continuum of hard history.”

Teaching Hard History begins with the long and brutal legacy of slavery and reaches through the victories of and violent responses to the Civil Rights Movement and Black Americans’ experiences during the Jim Crow era to the issues we face today. Learn more now with the updated Season 1, Episode 1: Slavery and the Civil War, Part 1. In this episode, Salem State University professor Bethany Jay examines the complex role that slavery played in causing the Civil War and outlines ways to teach this history and clarify our understanding of the Confederacy. The episode includes a new resource page with essential ideas, teaching recommendations from the conversation and updated resources. 

This is American history that we all need to know and that should be taught in schools and in communities.