A Letter to my APUSH Students

[I guess spoiler warning for Andor seasons 1 and 2? It’s just two out of context speeches, not that much plot. Just watch the show!]

So I don’t usually type up speeches for the end of the year. Things are too busy, I don’t have much to say other than “thank you” or “HAGS” or “I won’t have time to miss you because new students, replace you, blah blah blah.” In all honesty, it’s also really hard to connect 800 years of world history to something meaningful to sophomores as they’re heading into their dreaded middle child junior year.

This year is different.

In case you need reminded, AP US History is way, way, way more connected to our current world than WHAP was. WHAP was connected, without a doubt, but it traces longer paths to drop us off in the United States. We can say things like “a plague in the 14th century created economic opportunities that would eventually get us 20th century labor unions” or something, but the gap there is Atlantic Ocean-esque. On the other hand, when we see people right now arguing about the 14th amendment to the Constitution, just over 150 years old, but with plain text and even plain explanations from the folks who wrote it, that is a lot easier to draw conclusions from and analyze.

So teaching this year has bled into the news on a daily basis, and it’s been really hard to find the space and time to leave class behind because we’re living in, frankly, “unprecedented times” or whatever you want to call them. It’s a chapter in the history books, and the only question is where it all ends up.

It’s a lot, so let’s talk about Star Wars.

Star Wars has, for most of my life, been a bit silly. My generation has always tried to make it into this serious thing, while George Lucas digitally inserts farting animals into special editions. It has the kernel of something serious - there’s a rebellion against what is clearly, in the most comical terms possible, an evil empire. It’s literally the name of it. THE EMPIRE. They have a DEATH STAR. They blow up a planet like 30 minutes into the first film. It is not subtle. Given that my favorite period of US history is the American revolution, and how generally interested I am in modern political revolutions, I have to admit that this silly space opera really influenced my interest in history and eventually teaching history.

But it was never that deep. It was a family drama, it had some mystical philosophy at the center of it that while commendable on the one hand (life is bound together), goes in for some real simpleton solutions (no feelings! Light side or dark side! Peacekeepers have laser swords!). Best not to probe too far there or you’ll suddenly wonder if the Jedis are just real successful child traffickers. On the one hand, I could really just laugh at Star Wars and bail (Organa) on it, but it’s adventure stuff and we’re all allowed a problematic fave from our childhood, at least until it starts actively being evil.

Then Andor happened.

For anyone who has forgotten the “intro to the DBQ” fun last year in WHAP, we showed the opening crawl for the original 1977 Star Wars as an example of contextualization. In that crawl, it mentions that rebel spies stole the plans to the all caps DEATH STAR and now the evil Darth Father is chasing his daughter to try and take them back, before having a light genocide. Well, Andor is a Disney+ TV series that leads into the movie Rogue One, which is directly about the “rebel spies” who steal the DEATH STAR plans. Honestly, just explaining it makes me cringe a tiny tiny bit, but after 48 years of consuming Star Wars in every way, shape, or form, Andor is my favorite Star War. Period.

The showrunner, Tony Gilroy, has listened to the Revolutions podcast, my absolute favorite all-time podcast, and it shows. People complain about the first three episodes of season one being slow, and those same people probably complain about how kids these days have no patience or imagination. There are two moments in the show, two speeches really, that I want to discuss today in relation to US history, and AP US History, and 2025, and all that.

This first bit is a speech delivered to the Imperial Senate. The Senate still exists as a sort of illusion of the republic that existed before the Emperor took over, so it’s a lot of wealthy folks giving speeches and arguing about pointless shit so that it looks like the Empire cares at all. It’s a sham. Some of the senators, however, are in on the rebellion, and the first one to go public has the very Star Wars name “Mon Mothma.” She’s from a rich, prestigious, traditionalist planet, but she gives it all up to help organize and lead the rebellion. Late in Season 2, she uses some shady parliamentary procedure to get some speaking time, knowing she’s going to get shut down. Before she is censored, here’s a bit of what she has to say:

All of this. The second line is a little dramatic, but I want to discuss the other two lines as a sort of summary for why learning US history is important.

First, the distance between what is said and what is known… Reducing that gap is the most important job of history. What has happened here? What cause-effect chains can we trace to understand how we got here? What happened in the US when we had high tariffs? When has the Alien Act of 1798 been used and what happened? What is the impact on the United States of past immigration waves? What happens when the wealthiest elites of US society run Congress and the Presidency? What happens when we isolate ourselves from the rest of the world, economically or politically? A lot of stuff can be said about all this, but what do we actually know about all this?

That’s a lot of questions to get me to my first observation after teaching this class. Teaching really does force you to do a lot of learning – there’s nothing quite like it. I’ve taught US history before, but I think I have a better set of tools and learned a lot more this year. I am more convinced than ever that there is a fundamental dishonesty to the United States and our history. We work very hard to maintain a false pretense about a lot of stuff. We just don’t want to talk about mistakes, or failures, or whatever you want to call intentionally not doing the stuff we say we’re supposed to stand for. At best, we’re dishonest by omission, but you can see really easily how certain people benefit from the dishonesty. How offended they get when someone points out the mistakes or failures or the not doing the stuff we say we’re supposed to do. It’s not normal. You do not have to defend the Empire blowing up the Death Star! “But I like the branding!” “Vader’s red lightsaber looks cool!”

Honestly, it’s so childish. And when an adult pretends to be a child… I do not, and will not, respect that person’s evaluation and judgment.

Second – When the truth leaves us, we’re vulnerable to whoever screams the loudest? Welcome to 2025. Welcome to social media. Welcome to people on foodtok “cooking” food in toilets and somehow having millions of subscribers. Is it “good” because of how many followers they have? Sigh.

Our idea of truth, the way our society comes to a consensus on what truth is, it’s all completely broken. Oklahoma is going to require students to learn, basically, that Biden didn’t win the 2020 election in spite of the fact that he was, in fact, president for 4 years. Half of you said the moon landing was fake in your final projects, or you would, if you three would ever decide you don’t want a 50 in the gradebook for no reason at all (JUST TURN IT IN). Was the economy good or bad in 2024? Is COVID real? Do vaccines kill more people than they save? Is flouride in water lowering our IQ? Are hurricanes going to Alabama or not? Do billionaires really, really, really want to help the poor if only we’d lower their taxes? Is artificial intelligence, oops, A-1, more intelligent than your dog, or, let’s be serious, my one brain celled orange tabby? Is it ever okay to kill kids?

Apparently, we can’t agree on any of this. So we just shout about it. And guess who has the biggest megaphone to scream the loudest? Oh, the rich folks buying media companies? Or entire social media platforms? And what do we know about their purpose, or point of view? If they’re purely driven by profit, and division and ragebait sells, then why would our media ever let us put our differences aside and work together? If they can just buy candidates for elective office by jacking up the costs of campaigns, then why would our government ever shut up and just pass laws that would be a public good?

And of course now I sound like a conspiracy theorist. But imagine what it must have been like during the Gilded Age. Rich people ran the whole show. They fought organized labor and unions, they kept in place tariffs whose only purpose was to let the gilded jack up prices. They wanted hands off government, until some pesky state tried to regulate working hours or wages or protect the safety or well being of workers, at which point suddenly the federal government intervened, usually through the courts. So we had arsenic milk and beer for babies and kids killing a teacher with rocks, which I’m sure none of you have fantasized about since January.

But Mr. Hudson, I don’t want to learn history to be able to sort all this noise out. I have so much else going on in my life. I get it, honestly. We have so much information, it’s overwhelming. It’s like me having completely open tutorial time in the morning - there’s so much there that none of you ever show up!

So I get how exhausting it can be to always be on the defensive and feeling like you have to learn so much just to filter it all. So we get the loudest screamers, and they get to decide what is true. It’s not great.

The other quote from Andor is from Season 1. It’s a bit of a manifest, like, literally, but it’s just as important for this conversation:

You’ve spent a year in my class, some of you two years. You’ve been in a class where the teacher doesn’t rule by tight control, or god forbid tyranny. I have to tell younger teachers that they probably shouldn’t use me as a model for classroom management, because I’m not sure every teacher can pull off the BS that I manage in here – it’s so contextual, and it relies so much on my ability to tell stories, be somewhat entertaining, you guys being AP kids, whatever. But it’s far and away the best classroom environment I’ve had in 24 years. If I tried to squeeze and squeeze, to control every single thing you did, how long could I really make it work?

And that’s history too! There are so many stories, so much to know – history, like the galaxy, is an infinite well. I miss teaching gunpowder empires from AP World, because the Mughal Empire gives us such a great example of this idea - when the Empire was its most tolerant, its most connective with the Hindu and Muslim parts of its population, some of the most amazing art, science, culture ever, period! Then as it tried to control its population, tried to squeeze out the Hindu population or take over more southern regions, it broke. That left thing open for the British East India Company to take over, and it’s not a stretch to say that left us on the brink of nuclear war two weeks ago.

The people who try to control what you learn about history are going to fail. We don’t live in the late 1800s, where people are mostly illiterate and information is impossible to find. Not yet.

Don’t let people tell you what you can and can’t learn, not even me. Anyone with a lot of power, in a position of authority, who tries to reduce history down or place barriers around what you should read or learn should be instantly suspect. They aren’t necessarily wrong – but you should ask questions. Hopefully you’re better equipped to ask questions after this year – what is their point of view or situation? What’s their goal? If it’s to protect you, for example, from awful stuff, you should ask whether or not you actually need protection. Sometimes the answer is very much yes – we can harm ourselves in big or small ways by digging too deep sometimes. But if you approach information with some basic habits of historical thinking, there’s not much I can imagine ever telling you not to go read about or research.

The desire to control you is brittle, unnatural, and so desperate. Some of the most controlling teachers you have fear kids the most.

Controlling people is a historical force that we’ve watched from the social, economic, and political elite in two history classes now. However, the desire to squash what you can do and say it’s for liberty is a very American thing. No, we won’t let unpropertied men, or women, or immigrants, or enslaved people vote – it would be chaos that would destroy everyone’s liberty! No, we will not abolish slavery, that’s a clear violation of the economic liberty of their owners. No, we will not regulate contracts or labor, that’s an evil that will hamper our economic growth. No, we will not fight fascists in Europe, that’s a violation of their liberty and our liberty AT THE SAME TIME. AMERICA FIRST.

Again, clinging to a simplistic version of either the word liberty or the word equality is childish.

I do not, and will not, respect a person who is an absolutist about those words and refuses to understand that they work together, not separately.

So here we are, at the end of this class. I have been so fortunate in my teaching career to get an extension to my time with groups of students three times. It is honestly hard to imagine having a fresh new group next year with no familiar faces – or at least I hope you turn in your final projects so I don’t have any familiar faces. I hope that whether you’ve been in my class for one year or two, I’ve managed to communicate something about why history matters. History is people. Not fake people, not thematically literarily rhetorically designed people, but actual folks like us. Wherever they’ve come from, whatever their specific perspective on the world, they were like us at the most basic root. I may joke about not missing you, but I’ll never have another class that combines the unique sparkleponies here in this specific way, creating the shenanigans we’ve gotten up to all year. And that’s history too - every event is made up of a bunch of unique people, with their specific perspectives and goals and hopes. And then things happen - this is the greatness of Andor too, for the record. It takes a rebellion down to the individual level and shows us so many anonymous, but unique people who eventual lead to the destruction of a DEATH STAR and an end to THE EMPIRE.

That people are people and deserve to be treated like people is the truth that I refuse to give up about the United States and our stupid declaration of independence: we’re all people, and we all deserve the same rights. I know I’m not supposed to indoctrinate you or shove my own personal beliefs at you, but this one I’m not going to compromise on. If someone wants to fire me because I told you that Irish immigrants in the 1830s were people just like the descendants of Native Americans or just like the Africans our founders enslaved, or yes, the great great whatevers of English settlers (like me), fine. Some former student of mine will surely be a great lawyer and help me out, or they’ll have enough followers on socials so I can go viral and smear the moron who tries to get me fired for insisting that every person is a people and deserves the same rights. We’ve all been taught, whatever our background, that there is a way people ought to be treated.

We should apply that to history. We should apply that to ourselves! As a teacher I know I mess up and make mistakes in how I treat students. I feel so much shame about mispronouncing a name, or not hearing you, or hearing you but having to ignore you to deal with something else, or mishearing you and having the wrong reaction. All I can do is own it and try to do better the next time. If I can own that, then why can’t we own up to what long dead people did? Why can’t we admit to mistakes, and failures? Not allowing us to be ashamed about American history is wrong, and unnatural. If adults want to stop us from having those discussions in class, then they’re the ones who are wrong, not me.

We need the truth about history. We need to understand why people try to control other people. The Empire is a fundamental unit of history, and we’ve been studying it all year, and in some cases two years.

The fact is, I love all of y’all, and I refuse to let screaming wannabe stormtroopers tell you what you can and can’t learn, or what this country can or can’t be.

Thanks for one of the most memorable school years I’ve ever had.

-the end-

[For reference, here is an edit that has both speeches mixed together]