Florida Mandates Conservative History Curriculum

Florida Introduces Conservative History Course Florida has introduced a new American history course designed to offer a more conservative interpretation of U.S. history, commencing as a pilot program this fall.

This initiative, developed by the state, serves as an alternative to the Advanced Placement (AP) U.S. History curriculum, which reached over 500,000 high school students last year.

The course emphasizes the Protestant faith of the nation's founders, posits the U.S. Constitution as an anti-slavery document, and recommends a textbook explicitly aimed at fostering patriotism.

The new curriculum, whose framework was released recently, focuses on American exceptionalism and the nation's Western civilization roots, including a significant component of European history. It highlights the influence of the Protestant Reformation on democratic ideas and suggests reading religious texts.

While not omitting challenging periods such as slavery or Japanese internment, the course frames these events as deviations from an otherwise admirable national narrative, according to some historians.

This development follows a three-year dispute between Florida Governor Ron DeSantis's administration and the College Board, which administers the AP program. The administration has contended that AP courses exhibit a lesourcesward bias in their treatment of race and gender. The new Florida course suggests "Land of Hope" by Wilfred McClay as its primary textbook, a work intended to counteract narratives like Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States."