Edmund Burke once said “Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.” Well what about the people who rewrite history by failing to require students to learn it? Liberals in academia are obsessed with gender studies and world studies but American history? Not so much…

Deborah Lambert of Accuracy in Academia has the story.

Propaganda 1, History 0

In the interest of injecting some sanity into the escalating attacks on truth, Robert Pacquette, a history professor at Hamilton College, recently wrote that although he’s a traditional historian who teaches the principles of limited government and respect for private property, he doesn’t think that those facts register with today’s students.

However, according to the new rules adopted by “the eleven elite liberal arts colleges that make up the New England Small College Athletic Conference (NESCAC), which includes Amherst, Williams, Trinity, and Wesleyan,” “not one of these eleven colleges requires undergraduates to take a single course in American history.” In fact, most of these eleven elite colleges don’t even require that students who are majoring in history take any American history courses.”

However, non-western history is another story entirely. For example, Amherst only asks history majors to take “one course each in at least three different geographic areas.” The United States is but one of six geographic areas from which students can choose. Bowdoin College’s history department offers eight fields of study. Four “non-Euro/U.S. courses” are required, but not one US history course. Pacquet notes that in 2007, “one-third of all history majors at my college, Hamilton, were graduated without one course in American history.”