Lee, Justine Hwei ChiThis three-study dissertation addresses the broader question of identifying a collective memory of race in the Northern United States. The studies are conceptually linked by a critical race perspective and are distinct in research focus, methods, and findings. In the first study, I examined how 128 students from two New England states represented their understandings of the history of enslavement in the United States. I used inductive and deductive approaches to investigate how they connected this history to race and notions of national progress. In the second study, I used document analysis to investigate the representation of people of color in New York’s state standards for 11th grade U.S. history. I found that less than one-third of standards cited people of color, and the majority of such standards cited them alongside White people. This practice of exclusionary grouping reinforced Whiteness as normative by implying a essentialist view of race and ethnicity. In the third study, I employed discourse analysis to examine the representation of race in the New York U.S. history curricular framework and in the policy context of its intended use. I found that policy defining the purpose of social studies promoted nationalist and race-evasive discourses. Through strategic periodization, the curriculum segregated explicit references to race into an “alternate timeline,” whose narrative arc strongly implied racial progress. Moreover, I found that the selectively ahistorical use of the word “American” was used to mark groups as non-White. Ultimately, the state’s manipulation of time and language functioned to preserve discourses of national progress and U.S. moral exceptionalism and to suppress the study of race in history.enDissertationEducational sociologySocial sciences educationHistory EducationRaceState StandardsU.S. History