Eve Herold

Eve Herold is a fourth-year doctoral student in Social Studies Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her research is primarily focused on history curriculum, master narratives, and American exceptionalism. She previously taught middle school for eight years and has done curriculum work with current and preservice teachers.

When History is “a Downer:” Difficult History in Crash Course US History Videos.

Co-authored with: James Miles

Extensive research on the use of films in K-12 history classrooms has found that films are still regularly watched across North American classrooms, however often with little critical interrogation of their content or form (Donnelly, 2016; Paxton & Marcus, 2019). Despite the abundance of educational studies on both dramatized and documentary history films, scant research has focused on the use of YouTube in the history classroom such as the highly popular series “Crash Course,” which is designed for specific high school history courses. Currently, the Crash Course YouTube channel has over 13 million subscribers and over 1.7 billion video views. If so many students and teachers are watching Crash Course videos, either explicitly as a teaching tool or as a personal study aid, we believe this issue requires greater attention from educational researchers. In this chapter, we examine the video series “Crash Course US History” to better understand what makes this genre so popular, how it relates to existing research on teaching history with films, and how it might be understood as a new form of history learning that subsequently requires a new line of research. Further, we explore how the Crash Course series engages with difficult histories of genocide, state-sanctioned violence, colonialism, and slavery. In focusing on how these videos address historical injustice, we demonstrate the problematic ways in which Crash Course encourages a disengagement and distancing from historical violence, injustice, and suffering. As Crash Course has an audience of millions, we argue that the potential impact of these videos on students’ perceptions of the difficult past and history more generally is significant and requires further investigation.