This chapter links the creation of MAS to the historical creation of Ethnic Studies – setting the record straight on the nature of this type of education amidst massive amounts of local and national misinformation. It details what MAS was, the effects of the program on student academic success, while examining how critically engaged, educated Mexican American students came to be seen as such a “threat” to the state.

HB2281 (2010) was a state law meant to eliminate the TUSD MAS program. This is not conjecture but rather a direct statement from the law’s chief architect, former state superintendent of public instruction Tom Horne. This brief chapter provides a broad overview of the history and key figures in this protracted, painful, community-oriented drama of resistance, while also considering the difficulties of telling this story honestly. It draws a direct line between the current banning of Critical Race Theory nationally and this piece of Arizona legislation.

On August 22, 2017, Judge Tashima issued a blistering ruling finding that state representatives created the law and banned MAS based upon racial animus and partisan political gain in violation of the First and Fourteenth Amendment rights of Mexican American students in TUSD. There was a massive local and national uproar, celebrating the end of this racist law. Though different Tucson factions claimed shared victory due to the ruling, persistent community divisions remained. This chapter details the post-ruling celebrations, the continued community divisions, a summary of where the key actors in this drama ended up, the current state of MAS in TUSD, and the national Ethnic Studies renaissance that the Tucson struggle spawned. Of equal importance, this chapter details how the lessons of the MAS controversy can help inform the work of those challenging Critical Race Theory bans throughout the country.

The administrative law judge ruled against the district and the new state superintendent of public instruction, John Huppenthal, found TUSD out of compliance with state law. As one of TUSD’s staunchest MAS supporters passed away and in the wake of the multiple rulings against the district, the board voted to eliminate the program spawning walkouts that looked strikingly similar to the blowouts of the 1960s. This led UNIDOS to create the “School of Ethnic Studies,” a daylong youth-led space where students who were walking out could learn from the “forbidden curriculum.”

The “Tuscon 11’s” federal lawsuit continued, but the teachers lost the first round as Judge Tashima ruled in favor of the state. He was assigned to the case because the original judge in the trial was killed in the event where Arizona State Representative Gabrielle Giffords was shot in the head. Judge Tashima’s ruling led to an appeal to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Meanwhile, the National Association of Chicana/Chicano Studies (NACCS) demanded a formal investigation into the rape allegations against the Precious Knowledge director.

The trial begins and despite the community divisions, everyone showed up – not necessarily in support of the MAS teachers, but in opposition to the state banning. Two important witnesses were former MAS teacher Curtis Acosta who detailed his classroom approach, and the state tried to paint him as biased due to some spoken word lyrics he wrote (e.g., calling Horne and Huppenthal “Neanderthals in need of Geritol”). The second was Maya Arce, daughter of Sean Arce and prior student plaintiff in the case, testified about the critical importance of MAS for students like her.

When refracted through California, the story of US naval expansion in the 1880s – the creation of a small but respectable force of steel cruisers and gunboats – becomes a form of naval racing against Pacific newly made navies. Californians and their national allies argued for a New Navy, citing fears of Chile, China, and eventually Japan. These fears were not only material, stemming from the technical inferiority of the US Old Navy, but also cultural, as naval programs in the Pacific threatened assumptions about US racial and civilizational superiority. Physically, advanced navies in the Pacific stoked fear in Californian cities about raids from the sea. Technologically, Pacific newly made navies (and especially the Chilean cruiser Esmeralda) served as yardsticks to measure US Navy progress. Culturally, the sophistication of Pacific navies undermined beliefs about the position of the United States as the most advanced nation in the hemisphere. These threats allowed navalists to make an effective argument for funding a small, cruiser-dominated New Navy in the 1880s that could in the near term compete with its Pacific rivals.

The War of the Pacific (1879–1884) and the Sino-French War (1883–1885) put the Pacific’s newly made navies to the test after a decade of naval racing. These two wars are rarely compared, despite occurring more or less contemporaneously and employing many of the same technologies. In the War of the Pacific, Chilean victory transformed the Chilean Navy into the “preponderant force in South America.” As a hemispheric matter, the Chilean newly made navy also became a credible danger to the “Old Steam Navy” and soon the US “New Navy’s” nearest pacing threat. Strategic defeat in the Sino-French War masked Chinese tactical successes that would guide the Qing Empire’s self-strengthening efforts in the coming decades. Defeat was not a refutation but rather confirmation of the need to cultivate an effective navy, spurring on the expansion of the Beiyang Fleet until it became the dominant power in Northeast Asia by the early 1890s. In an era of vicious anti-Chinese racism in the United States, the Qing’s possession of a modern navy created debate and cultural anxiety in California.

This chapter explores a hardy perennial – the meaning of the American Civil War – from the standpoints of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. It evaluates historian David Potter’s 1968 assertion that, from an international perspective, the defeat of the American South’s bid for independent nationhood and the emancipation of enslaved Blacks, the American Civil War resulted in an unprecedented marriage of liberalism and nationalism, a union unique in the formation of nineteenth-century nation-states. This marriage not only gave liberalism a strength it might otherwise have lacked but also lent nationalism a democratic legitimacy that it may not otherwise have deserved. It also explores how the end of the Cold War and the emergence of multiple decentralizing technologies (cell phones, social media, the internet, etc.) and other polarizing forces which have raised serious questions about whether a more than 150-year-old marriage can survive the centrifugal temptations of the new century.

For many years, the reality about the role of women in American and southern history remained the absence of scholarship about women and the absence of women in the profession. The journey of women into the world of professional historians involved overcoming many stereotypes and prejudices. A few women emerged as professional historians who made major contributions into new areas of scholarship as early as the post-World War II years, but the ratio of women to men only began to increase in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Economist Claudia Goldin identified a “quiet revolution” of women entering the history profession between 1950 and 1970, which then exploded as women rushed into the profession in force during the 1970s. The influx of talented women opened new fields of study (women, family, social history topics, etc.). This chapter examines the influence of women who shaped new areas of study while also offering new perspectives on longstanding questions of broad scholarly interest.