All the World's a Stage

I couldn't resist one of the most famous quotations from As You Like It.  But, it gets me thinking.  "If all the world's a stage And all the men and women merely players," what characters are in our show and which are not?

Let me be a bit clearer.  I am beginning a self-directed research project around diversity in teaching social studies.  To go back to our Shakespeare metaphor, what characters currently populate our stage of social studies or history?  What characters are missing?  How do we start to restore some of the missing characters to textbooks and other materials?  What happens when those characters are not easily matched on to state standards?

The first step in my journey has been reading James Loewen's Teaching What Really Happened.  The first chapter has already got my wheels turning about why it is so important to reinvigorate social studies and the key role that history plays in our lives.

The second step has been collecting some resources that might destabilize traditional narratives of U.S. history.  They include:

• Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African American History
• Kim E. Nielsen's A Disability History of the United States
• Michael Bronski's A Queer History of the United States

Are there other recommendations you might have?

I have done a bit of online research and have not found the right resources yet.  Any recommendations in the digital world?

(P.S. - I couldn't think about missing characters in Shakespeare and not think about Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.  A great riff on what happens to the minor roles in plays.)