The history we are taught in school shapes how we understand the country around us, but whose history gets treated as essential has never been a neutral question. For generations, American classrooms often centered presidents, wars, founding documents and political institutions while giving far less attention to the experiences of Black Americans, Indigenous people and other communities whose lives were equally important to the nation's development. Black history was frequently reduced to slavery, a few famous abolitionists, and the Civil Rights Movement, leaving students with enormous gaps in what happened before, between and after those periods. Black history is not a separate chapter of American history. The labor of enslaved people helped build the nation's economy. Reconstruction transformed American citizenship and produced some of the country's earliest Black elected officials. Jim Crow shaped law, housing, education and voting for generations. The Great Migration changed cities, politics, music and culture. Black soldiers served in America's wars while returning home to discrimination, and Black activists repeatedly forced the country to confront the distance between its democratic ideals and reality. Even subjects that may appear unrelated to race, from medicine and science to literature, business, agriculture and popular culture, contain important Black stories.