Political Weirdos

So just to give some hope, when I was in high school, my highschool had a really cool setup for the history classes clearly designed to address this problem of history books aging poorly and not enough time in a school year to reasonably cover history. They instead broke history class into 4 separate classes that you take one each year of highschool. First year covered conflict of the first settlers and native people through to the year 1900, second year covered 1900-1950 third year covered 1950-1980 and the final year covered 1980-present, so not only did I get to learn about events like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire and Watergate but also we talked about the War on Terror (because I was also born in the 90s) and many of Bush Jr's policies

Obviously being in public school, they took a relatively safe approach to covering some of the stickier topics (I specifically remember being royally confused when learning about the Red Scare and kinda going "wait, but what is so bad about communism?" Or the talk about Desert Storm, Desert Shield, and later the Iraq war wasn't as clear about just how pointless those wars were than they could have been. Or the talk about Reagan didn't cover so much of his devastating policies, or the Watergate scandal was basically framed as "Nixon was kinda quirky and didn't trust people!" etc.) but it at least gave an incredible baseline of historical background to understand most US policies from and a baseline to fill in with my own research later on in life (which I absolutely have! Learning more about practices of Mercantilism in the 16th-18th centuries really brings all of the colonialism and enslavement of "lesser" peoples into clarity, or learning in more depth about Nixon's and later Reagan's policies and how they influenced the modern era. How Roger Ailes worked with the Nixon and Reagan administrations and from that experience turned Fox News into the Republican party trumpet that it is today, etc. etc.)