(Slave) "Families were broken apart" and "Slave owners broke apart (slave) families" say the same thing. We could argue the pros and cons of language usage forever, and not get anywhere. She's splitting hairs.

And then what? Writers are to never say slaves sometimes danced and were happy? That would not be truthful.

is standard fare for composition courses

We might compare this:

But, when textbooks are written, then it's not so much that they reflect someone else's worldview, but that they don't reflect our own?

The approval process has leaned towards extremist rightwing views for decades, and in recent years the problem has only increased

We were talking about the phrase "families were broken apart" as opposed to "slave masters broke apart families". You offered up one about the Nazi's - was that even in the textbook? - and now for some reason you think I need more education. Maybe I do, but yeah, Republicans in Texas are a bunch of jerks who want the kiddies indoctrinated to their way of thinking - and they're not the only ones. But, that puts textbook writers in the same bind they've always been in: how to write a textbook that will pass political muster with the dominant culture in the state without losing the truth completely?

Look: we all grew up with textbooks that were slanted one way or another. Kids will eventually figure out if something has been white-washed. They always do. We did! Well, maybe you don't think I did since I need more education, but most people did!

Not at all.

And it's hard to dance when you're in chains, or locked in a barn with the livestock. It's hard to be happy when your wives, husbands, children or yourself are being sold off at auction, or being whipped for disrespect or not working hard enough to please the master.

I obviously can't prove that there was never a happy dancing slave. But if I were teaching the history of slavery, that would not be the important point I would stress.

Please think for just a moment. If you were a slave, kept under the same conditions of most of our American slaves, would you honestly be happy and dancing? Honestly?

If your point is to teach that all slave were miserable 24/7 all of their lives, wore chains every minute, and received a whipping every day, twice a day, three times, then teach it that way. It will not be truthful, but your students will soon enough figure that out. But why do you want to view slaves as non- humans who never experienced joy or happiness in their lives? That's what your students will be wondering, too. IMO, they experienced the full range of human emotions, and they weren't any different than other people. They were exploited and unjustly treated.

Slavery, as a system, did not allow them to reach their full potential in life, and it robbed them of their basic freedoms. I suppose we do a better job these days, but we still have a system that does not allow many millions of people in this country to meet their full potential. So, how much better are we? How "free" is a homeless person in our country?

If there was a back door at the Alamo, there'd never have been a fight

by James W. Russell
5-28-12

... As the defenders of the Alamo were about to sacrifice their lives, other Texans were making clear the goals of the sacrifice at a constitutional convention for the new republic they hoped to create. In Section 9 of the General Provisions of the Constitution of the Republic of Texas, it is stated how the new republic would resolve their greatest problem under Mexican rule: “All persons of color who were slaves for life previous to their emigration to Texas, and who are now held in bondage, shall remain in the like state of servitude ... Congress shall pass no laws to prohibit emigrants from bringing their slaves into the republic with them, and holding them by the same tenure by which such slaves were held in the United States; nor shall congress have power to emancipate slaves.”

Mexico had in fact abolished slavery in 1829, causing panic among the Texas slaveholders, overwhelmingly immigrants from the south of the United States. They in turn sent Stephen Austin to Mexico City to complain. Austin was able to wrest from the Mexican authorities an exemption for the department -- Texas was technically a department of the state of Coahuila y Tejas -- that would allow the vile institution to continue. But it was an exemption reluctantly given, mainly because the authorities wanted to avoid rebellion in Texas when they already had problems in Yucatán and Guatemala. All of the leaders of Mexico, in itself only an independent country since 1821, were personally opposed to slavery, in part because of the influence of emissaries from the freed slave republic of Haiti. The exemption was, in their minds, a temporary measure and Texas slaveholders knew that ...

The Mexican armies that entered the department to put down the rebellion had explicit orders to free any slaves that they encountered, and so they did. The only person spared in the retaking of the Alamo was Joe, the personal slave of William Travis ...

The defenders of the Alamo, as brave as they may have been, were martyrs to the cause of the freedom of slaveholders, with the Texas War of Independence having been the first of their nineteenth-century revolts, with the American Civil War the second.

http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/146405

Not for policies which led to mass executions of aristocrats, but for abolishing slavery.

simultaneously to shine as an idealist while living an extraordinarily hypocritical life

I recommend Gordon-Reed's book "The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family," which investigates his personal contradictions in some detail, with an insightful mix of careful argument and attention to known historical details. There is, for example, the story of Sam Howell, who in 1770 Virginia sued for his freedom, with Jefferson as his pro bono lawyer arguing against partus sequitur ventrem that Under the law of nature, all men are born free, every one comes into the world with a right to his own person, which includes the liberty of moving and using it at his own will. The judge, of course, had no patience for such views, interrupted Jefferson in mid-sentence, and finally ruled against Howell. But it seems that Jefferson later gave Howell some money, whereupon Howell apparently escaped from bondage and disappeared from the historical record