Unity And Diversity: The Evolution Of American Middle School History Education

Unity and diversity is a major issue that has been plaguing the United States for a longtime. American built on the basis of immigrants, then a verity of popular religion, classrelations are complicated, people place the concept of strong. Although the publication of theDeclaration of Independence proclaimed the birth of the United States, but has not yet formeda unified sense of national identity in terms of ideology. In this case, the United States bymeans of education, especially the history education, shaping the American founding leaderheroism image, giving the United States revolutionary sublime significance, in order to createa unique culture of the United States of America. After the civil war, In the face of theimmigrant integration, to the exclusion of later immigrants’ culture, many Americans eager toreturn to the Anglo-Saxon families, emphasize the natural link with Britain, the Anglo-Saxonwhite Protestant Culture mainstream position established.As the United States government to education without jurisdiction, state historyeducation there is no uniform standard, due to the different historical narrative to exist for along time. Even after the establishment of mainstream culture in the process, different regions,different ethnic groups, such as the southern whites, blacks, Irish Catholic immigrants aretrying to build their own historical narrative to influence the middle school history education,so as to express their own cultural characteristics. Nineteen sixties, American historiographywith new changes and development of various subcultures, especially after the rise of the civilrights movement and women’s movement to change the traditional Anglo-Saxon whiteProtestant monopoly of culture, emphasize more attention and research of blacks and otherminorities and women and other vulnerable groups of plural cultural development, an elementand multiple dispute upgrades ceaselessly, especially the history of the United States NationalCurriculum Standards promulgated by the more massive debate. Can say, in the debate aboutAmerican history education in middle school in an effort to find the appropriate point tobalance the union and multivariate feature.This paper tries to analyze the American middle school history education evolution toreveal the relationship between unity and diversity and change, then to interpret the unity anddiversity of the essence of the struggle, and America culture development trend.