A few days ago, I saw a chart showing what U.S. demographics believed that the United States invented slavery. I noted it for a future post, and now I can’t find it, but I found plenty of authority that supports that assertion. Coleman Hughes, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and a fellow and contributing editor at their City Journal, has been making this point for years. Way back in 2016, The College Fix wrote in part,
For 11 years, Professor Duke Pesta gave quizzes to his students at the beginning of the school year to test their knowledge on basic facts about American history and Western culture.
The most surprising result from his 11-year experiment? Students’ overwhelming belief that slavery began in the United States and was almost exclusively an American phenomenon, he said.
“Most of my students could not tell me anything meaningful about slavery outside of America,” Pesta told The College Fix. “They are convinced that slavery was an American problem that more or less ended with the Civil War, and they are very fuzzy about the history of slavery prior to the Colonial era. Their entire education about slavery was confined to America.”…
The origin of these quizzes, which Pesta calls “cultural literacy markers,” was his increasing discomfort with gaps in his students’ foundational knowledge.
“They came to college without the basic rudiments of American history or Western culture and their reading level was pretty low,” Pesta told The Fix….
Often, more students connected Thomas Jefferson to slavery than could identify him as president, according to Pesta. On one quiz, 29 out of 32 students responding knew that Jefferson owned slaves, but only three out of the 32 correctly identified him as president. Interestingly, more students— six of 32—actually believed Ben Franklin had been president.
Pesta said he believes these students were given an overwhelmingly negative view of American history in high school, perpetuated by scholars such as Howard Zinn in “A People’s History of the United States,” a frequently assigned textbook.
Ethics Alarms 
This is near Easter season: they show “The Ten Commandments” on ABC every year. Hello? Building the pyramids? Moses? “Exodus”?
Jack, just curious…Do you think Moses/the Israelites built the pyramids?
Not that I don’t understand and agree with your point, but I find it a bit ironic to use false history to prove false history.
I am mixed here. It is a common myth that slaves were used to build the pyramids; perhaps pervasive enough to just ever so possibly suggest slavery existed elsewhere, thousands of years before Europeans knew of North America?
Its also commonly taught that slaves often escaped to Canada, but I guess less common to teach that is because Canada abolished slavery in the 1830’s (along with its then British overlords).
Interestingly, Mexico also abolished slavery in the 1830’s, but we don’t commonly hear about slaves escaping south. Maybe it was because fugitives slaves hit the relative comfort of the free states along the way, unlike traveling through the deepest of the Deep South to get to Mexico?
Why is this a surprise? The Democratic Party and their Education Departments have been teaching this since at least the 1980’s. The Democratic Party has hated the United States and everything it stands for. They claim ‘we have a right to criticize our government’, but they never have anything good to say about our country. These are not good people and they never have been.
The only countries who ever decided, all by themselves, that slavery was morally wrong spoke English.
Just leave this here….
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMPAAuG2pH8