"Fighting for Democracy" is intended to complement but also rethink and reframe the familiar curriculum in its focus upon the deeds of excluded groups that ensured and extended democracy's compass.

Too often, students see those separated from power and privilege as victims. They appear in textbooks because of what was done to them rather than what they themselves did. They are passive, and not active. Students thus read about the conquest and near extinction of Native Americans, the enslavement and emancipation of African Americans, the conquest and immigration of Mexican Americans, and the exclusion and detention of Japanese Americans.

This curriculum stresses instead the struggles of those excluded groups against physical and cultural genocide, against inhumanity and economic exploitation, and against inequality and racism. Their acts of resistance, as individuals and collectives, constitute a human and civil rights movement that flows like a river through the entirety of the nation's past.