Quote Originally Posted by SadisticNature View Post
So for example with McCarthyism we should portray the cold war and its intensity, and the fear about spies leaking criminal information. We should present the view that communism is incompatible with the freedoms of America and that McCarthyism was necessary to prevent that threat. We should also prevent the view that communism is incompatible with American values but McCarthyism was also incompatible with those values. We should talk about how those errors were actually violations of rights, and how McCarthyism was a witch hunt where evidence was often at the level of he said/she said. We should present the Oppenheimer trial in all its gory detail from both sides.

You'd be amazed about how many Americans born well after the fact don't even know about how Oppenheimer (the man who developed the bomb that ended WWII) was treated by the Eisenhower administration due to McCarthyism.
I agree with you. As I said in my last post, some subjects simply cannot be defined objectively, and history is certainly one of them. One thing I can recall from my own high school history days is a teacher who gave an assignment to the class to compare the descriptions of the American Revolution as written in the Encyclopedia Americana with that written in the Encyclopedia Brittanica. For the most part the facts were in agreement. The way they were presented, and interpreted, were miles apart much of the time.

But this doesn't mean they cannot be taught in a more neutral manner, without bias. Using a consensus of historians to prepare a history text book rather than an extremely biased local BOE would tend to give a much more realistic view of actual events, while still allowing those events to be presented in context.