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Teaching Controversial Topics in the History Classroom

August 24, 2026

Teaching Controversial Topics in the History Classroom 

By David Buie
History_Academix: Reflections

There are moments in a history classroom when you can almost feel the atmosphere change.

Mention slavery. Reconstruction. Race. The Civil War. Native American removal. Immigration. Vietnam. The Holocaust. Religion. Gender. Segregation. Political violence. The use of the atomic bomb. Even the meaning of the American Revolution.

Students sit a little differently. Some become intensely interested. Others become quiet. A few already know what they believe and are waiting for an opportunity to say it.

Those moments do not tell me that I have wandered into territory that should be avoided. Usually, they tell me that we have reached precisely the history that needs to be taught.

After years of teaching college history, I have become convinced that our responsibility as historians and educators is not to make history comfortable. It is to make history understandable.

Those are not the same thing.

There are parts of the past that should make us uncomfortable. Human beings have enslaved other human beings. Governments have dispossessed people of their land. Nations have gone to war for reasons that remain debated generations later. Ordinary people have participated in systems of oppression, while other ordinary people have resisted them. Americans have expanded the boundaries of liberty while simultaneously denying liberty to others.

If we remove everything from history that might make someone uncomfortable, we no longer have history. We have something closer to mythology.

But there is another side to this responsibility.

Teaching difficult history does not give an instructor permission to be careless with it.

That distinction matters.

The Classroom Is Not a Political Rally

I tell students, in one form or another, that my job is not to tell them what to think. My job is to teach them how to think historically.

That means asking questions.

What happened?

What evidence do we have?

Who created that evidence?

Why was it created?

Whose perspective does it represent?

What other perspectives are missing?

What was happening at the time?

What conclusions can the evidence reasonably support?

And perhaps most importantly: What evidence would cause us to reconsider our conclusion?

These questions become particularly important when the subject is controversial.

Historians certainly make arguments. We interpret evidence. We disagree with one another. Historiography exists precisely because historical interpretation changes as historians ask new questions, discover new evidence, and reconsider older assumptions.

But historical interpretation is not the same thing as personal opinion.

An interpretation has to survive contact with evidence.

That is one of the most important distinctions I can teach my students.

My own academic work and teaching have repeatedly taken me into subjects where history, memory, race, citizenship, and politics intersect. My research has included urban slavery, Reconstruction memory, and Albion W. Tourgée, while my classroom and public-history work has addressed slavery, Reconstruction, Vietnam, westward expansion, military history, and historical memory (Buie 2015, 2016). Those experiences have reinforced something I learned long ago: difficult subjects become more manageable when we stop beginning with conclusions and start with evidence.

Start with the Sources

Whenever possible, I want students to encounter the people of the past themselves.

Not because primary sources are automatically truthful. They are not.

Primary sources can lie.

They can exaggerate.

They can omit.

They can justify.

They can propagandize.

They can reveal prejudices that are deeply disturbing to modern readers.

But that is exactly why they are valuable.

The Library of Congress describes primary sources as the “raw materials of history” and emphasizes that working with them encourages students to question evidence, evaluate information, make inferences, and construct reasoned interpretations (Library of Congress n.d.).

That process is fundamental to how I teach.

Give students Frederick Douglass rather than merely telling them what Frederick Douglass believed. Let them read formerly enslaved people describing slavery. Put political speeches beside newspaper editorials. Compare legislation with the experiences of the people affected by it. Examine propaganda from opposing sides of a war. Ask students why two people who witnessed the same event might remember it differently.

Then ask:

What do you see?

What do you think it means?

What evidence supports that conclusion?

That last question is critical.

The Library of Congress recommends having students compare sources, examine creator, audience, purpose, bias, and context, and look for evidence that either supports or contradicts their assumptions (Library of Congress n.d.).

That is historical thinking.

And when controversial subjects are involved, it also moves the instructor away from being the person declaring what students must believe.

The evidence becomes the center of the conversation.

Multiple Perspectives Do Not Mean All Interpretations Are Equally Valid

This is where teaching controversial history becomes complicated.

I strongly believe students should encounter multiple perspectives. History becomes distorted when we pretend that everyone in the past experienced an event in the same way.

But there is a danger in confusing multiple perspectives with false equivalence.

Teaching multiple perspectives does not mean pretending that every historical claim deserves equal weight.

There are facts.

Slavery existed.

The Holocaust occurred.

Jim Crow laws enforced racial segregation.

Japanese Americans were incarcerated by the United States government during World War II.

The United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Those facts are not classroom debate topics.

What historians can debate are questions of interpretation, causation, motivation, consequences, memory, and significance.

Why did something happen?

Could it have happened differently?

How did different groups experience it?

How did people justify their actions?

What alternatives existed?

How should we understand its consequences?

Those are historical questions.

The American Historical Association has long recognized that controversial subjects belong in history classrooms and that historians must consider how best to approach them rather than simply whether they should be discussed at all (American Historical Association 2010).

That distinction has become increasingly important in an age when disagreement itself is sometimes treated as evidence that there can be no historical truth.

There can.

History is interpretive, but it is not infinitely malleable.

Evidence establishes boundaries.

Context Is Explanation, Not Excuse

One of the most difficult concepts for students is historical context.

Students naturally judge people in the past according to the moral and social assumptions of the present. Sometimes that judgment is entirely understandable. The danger comes when judgment replaces investigation.

My job as a historian is first to ask students to understand.

Why did people believe what they believed?

What political, religious, economic, cultural, or social forces shaped those beliefs?

What choices did people believe were available to them?

Who challenged those assumptions at the time?

Understanding historical context does not mean excusing historical behavior.

Explaining slavery does not excuse slavery.

Explaining why segregation developed does not justify segregation.

Explaining the racial thinking of the nineteenth century does not require accepting it.

Context helps us understand how human beings arrived at decisions and institutions that may seem incomprehensible when viewed only through the present.

Without context, history becomes a courtroom in which the present constantly prosecutes the past.

With context but without moral seriousness, history can become an exercise in rationalization.

The historian has to navigate between the two.

Students Bring Their Own History into the Room

We sometimes talk about controversial subjects as though controversy exists inside the textbook.

It does not.

It exists in people.

Students enter the classroom carrying families, communities, religions, political beliefs, cultural identities, experiences, and assumptions. The instructor does too.

We should acknowledge that reality rather than pretending it does not exist.

Facing History & Ourselves recommends establishing expectations before difficult conversations so students understand that disagreement can occur while dignity and mutual respect remain nonnegotiable (Facing History & Ourselves 2009). Its work on difficult classroom conversations similarly emphasizes creating conditions where students can speak honestly, listen seriously, and encounter perspectives different from their own without turning historical discussion into personal attack (Facing History & Ourselves 2016).

I think that is particularly important in a college history classroom.

Students should be able to disagree.

In fact, productive disagreement can be one of the best things that happens in a classroom.

But disagreement has rules.

Challenge the argument.

Question the evidence.

Offer another interpretation.

Ask for the source.

Do not attack the person.

And everyone, including the instructor, should be held to that standard.

A classroom in which students are afraid to ask a question is not intellectually healthy. Neither is a classroom in which cruelty is disguised as “debate.”

We can demand both intellectual freedom and intellectual responsibility.

Do Not Hide the Ugly Parts

Some historical sources contain language and ideas that are profoundly offensive.

Teachers need to make deliberate choices about how those materials are presented.

There is a difference between studying racist language in its historical context and casually reproducing it. There is a difference between examining an image of racial violence because it contributes something necessary to historical understanding and displaying it simply for shock value.

The question I ask is straightforward:

What does this material teach that cannot be taught as effectively another way?

If I use disturbing material, students deserve context before they encounter it.

They should know what they are about to see and why they are seeing it.

We should never sanitize the brutality of slavery, racial violence, genocide, war, or oppression. But we also should not turn human suffering into classroom spectacle.

The people we study were human beings before they became historical examples.

That deserves respect.

Teach Students to Separate Evidence from Emotion, Without Pretending Emotion Does Not Exist

History can make us angry.

It can make us proud.

It can make us ashamed.

It can make us confused.

It can even make us question things we have believed for years.

That is not necessarily a problem.

The problem begins when emotion becomes the evidence.

A student saying, “I don't like that interpretation,” is not the same as demonstrating that the interpretation is historically wrong.

Likewise, an instructor believing strongly in an interpretation does not make it correct.

The response should always return to evidence.

Show me.

Where did you find that?

Who wrote it?

When?

What was the context?

Can we corroborate it?

Is there evidence pointing in another direction?

This approach has become even more important in the digital age. My teaching and faculty-development work has increasingly emphasized evaluating online sources because students now encounter historical claims through websites, videos, social media, search engines, and artificial intelligence alongside books and scholarly articles (Buie 2024).

Information is abundant.

Credible information is another matter.

The historian's skill is not simply knowing information. It is knowing how to evaluate it.

The Instructor Has Power, and That Requires Restraint

One issue we do not discuss enough is the imbalance of power in a classroom.

I assign the grades.

I determine much of the course content.

I decide who gets called on.

I have years of historical training that most of my students do not.

That gives my words weight whether I intend them to have it or not.

Responsible teaching requires remembering that.

Students should never have to agree with my political, religious, or social beliefs to succeed in my class.

They do, however, have to support historical claims with evidence.

That is a very different standard.

If a student reaches a conclusion different from mine but constructs a strong argument using credible evidence, demonstrates historical context, acknowledges contradictory evidence, and reasons carefully, then that student has done exactly what I asked.

Education is not successful when students learn to repeat the professor.

Education is successful when students learn to think without the professor.

Sometimes the Best Answer Is “I Don't Know”

Professors do not know everything.

Historians certainly do not.

One of the healthiest things an instructor can say is:

“I don't know. Let's find out.”

That does not diminish authority.

It models scholarship.

Historical knowledge is built through questions. Students need to see that intellectual uncertainty is not weakness. Sometimes the evidence is incomplete. Sometimes historians genuinely disagree. Sometimes a student's question exposes something I had never considered.

Those are good moments.

We should use them.

An instructor who believes every difficult question requires an immediate definitive answer risks replacing historical inquiry with performance.

I would rather demonstrate how a historian investigates a question.

History Should Complicate Us

I do not believe the purpose of history education is to make students love America.

I do not believe its purpose is to make them hate America either.

Both approaches begin with a predetermined conclusion.

History should help students understand America, and the larger human experience, in all its complexity.

The United States can be a nation founded upon revolutionary claims about liberty while maintaining slavery.

Reconstruction can represent one of the most ambitious attempts at interracial democracy in American history and still end in devastating political failure.

Industrialization can dramatically improve standards of living while producing exploitation and dangerous working conditions.

American involvement in war can contain courage, sacrifice, strategic necessity, political calculation, terrible mistakes, and unintended consequences at the same time.

History does not always give us the simplicity we want.

That is one of its greatest lessons.

The Goal Is Not Comfort. It Is Intellectual Courage.

When students leave my classroom, they will forget dates.

They will forget names.

They will certainly forget some of my lectures.

That does not bother me nearly as much as it once did.

What I hope remains is a habit of mind.

When someone makes a historical claim, ask for the evidence.

When a quotation appears online, find out where it came from.

When two accounts disagree, investigate why.

When a story seems too simple, look for what has been left out.

When evidence challenges something you believe, do not immediately run from it.

Examine it.

That is what historical education can give students.

Teaching controversial history responsibly does not mean avoiding controversy. It means refusing to exploit it.

It means creating classrooms where difficult questions can be asked, evidence matters more than volume, disagreement does not require disrespect, and neither patriotism nor condemnation substitutes for historical analysis.

Most importantly, it means trusting students enough to let history be complicated.

I have spent much of my career trying to teach students that history is not merely something that happened.

It is an argument about what happened, why it happened, what it meant, and why we continue to remember it.

Those arguments require evidence.

They require humility.

They require context.

And sometimes they require courage.

That is not a reason to avoid the hard subjects.

That is the reason we teach them.

References

American Historical Association. 2010. “Controversy in the Classroom: A Matter for Debate.” Perspectives on History, May 1, 2010.

Buie, David. 2015. “Albion Tourgée: An Unsung Hero.” Paper presented at the HGSO/PAT Conference, Texas A&M University.

Buie, David. 2016. “Albion Tourgée and the Abolitionist Memory.” Paper presented at the Woodlands Center Research Symposium, Sam Houston State University.

Buie, David. 2016. “Charleston and Houston: A Comparison of Urban Slavery.” Paper presented at the HGSO/PAT Conference, Texas A&M University.

Buie, David. 2024. “Master Your Class: Evaluating Online Sources.” Faculty development presentation, Lone Star College.

Buie, David. 2024. “Master Your Class: Using Primary Sources in Research.” Faculty development presentation, Lone Star College.

Facing History & Ourselves. 2009. “Contracting.” Teaching strategy. October 19, 2009.

Facing History & Ourselves. 2016. “Preparing Students for Difficult Conversations.” Lesson plan. March 28, 2016.

Library of Congress. n.d. “Getting Started with Primary Sources.” Teachers, Programs, Library of Congress. Accessed August 24, 2026.