You say that
“Unfortunately, it just so happens that, with few exceptions, white men did do all the important things in U.S. history”
… well, it depends on what you mean by “things.”

As a history major, I am sure you have heard about this debate and maybe it just slipped your mind… the debate being WHAT we teach when we teach history. Particularly because of the heterosexual males being in power and creating history and the corresponding textbooks, history has traditionally been about big events: wars, elections, economic depression, trade agreements. And you are correct if by “things” you mean these “big events.” White men were the generals, the presidents, the diplomats. Since the increase in female, minority, and also queer scholars in the history field, the argument has been made that we are neglecting the big picture of history. Demographics and racism are side notes. When racism is mentioned, it’s like “oh, and then the good and benevolent white men of the North who were not racist at all saved the poor black man from slavery.” Women aren’t mentioned unless they “do” something, like write some important letters like Abigail Adams. “Gender roles in the 19th century” might be the two-page attempt at addressing everything about being female in the 1800s, complete with sweeping generalizations that at best cover average white women, and never mention something like freed African slave women.

High school history is indoctrination to make us complacent, proud, and patriotic. When we want to bring women, blacks, Native Americans, Latinos, and queers into history it is not because we are deluded enough to think that some black woman was a general in the Civil War or because we want to talk about all the great Native American senators. It is because there are whole stories that are not told. While these groups have few heroes, such as the white males George Washington, Abe Lincoln, Ulysses Grant, what happened to these people was no less monumental than the actions of a few “important” white men who did the “important things in U.S. history.”

A whole book was written on this topic, which I plan to purchase. Though I have not read it, I have heard a lot about it, Lies My Teacher Told Me. You and I, as well-educated people, know some of the lies already. How Columbus didn’t really “discover” America and how the general consensus was that the world really was round and Columbus wasn’t hot shit for arriving at that conclusion. Then of course there is the genocide as well as the epidemic diseases of the native population. There is the barely mentioned Spanish conquest which has left huge lasting consequences in the American West, as we see today, as recent as yesterday, with the immigrant protests. Yes, we talk about the Spaniards owned this, then there was a war, and we took that, the end. What is not discussed is the land treaties given to Mexicans in the Southwest which their government really did not have much authority to give away. This led to many skirmishes which reached through the times of the Mexican Revolution when Zapata would raid the border. It led to the myth of Aztlan and the Chicano movement. Which led to revolts against racism… and on and on…which led to yesterday and the 55,000 people marching in San Francisco. People don’t connect the dots between the war in the 1840s and the 2006 May Day protest, precisely because the Latino perspective is not a continuous thread in history classes. Very few men actually “did important things” (Chavez is the only one coming to mind) yet teaching about Latinos is extremely relevant to both history as well as current events.

Lies My Teacher Told Me also addresses the lack of social class in our history textbooks. He discusses how we are taught to innately trust and respect the federal government. We are not taught about our government’s participation in state-sponsored terrorism. Not until POL 337 in college under the instruction of a socialist professor did I understand the full impact of the U.S. government on the coup against Allende in 1973. I mean, I knew “the CIA was involved,” but it is much more complicated than that. We aren’t taught to criticize or analyze. We are taught to memorize pre-packaged factoids about heroic white men who did “things.”

The last chapter in this book is entitled: What Is the Result Of Teaching History Like This? Minority Students End Up Alienated, All Students End Up Bored, and No One Can Use the Past To Think Cogently About the Future.

Kuehl herself is not concise when she says that we are left with the impression that only white men did “anything” important, because she too is not defining what the hell a “thing” in history is. So I am not saying she is right, and you are wrong. I am saying I think we should all seriously reconsider what is taught as “history,” particularly in the impressionable high school years when the message that women didn’t do “anything” until suffrage leaves me, for one, alienated. At the least, if we can’t figure out what every non-male non-white person “did,” we should cover EVERYTHING about what the white males did: philosophized about whether women had the minds to vote, kept slaves while writing about freedom, incessantly murdered native peoples, seized lands in a manifest destiny craze. We get the impression that sexist, racist, power-hungry men were the exception, but they were the rule. Putting more perspective on history would give us a better picture of our country that would be more meaningful and relevant to our present then remembering battles and dates.

Mark, you are completely wrong. GLBTs have been around since this country's inception. As a matter of fact, Ben Franklin's two favorite meals were 1) broiled snipes and 2)GLBTs--respectively, of course.

Or we could put our money where out mouth is and stop creating de facto historical segregation. By requiring more information about blacks, hispanics, women, gays et cetera what we're saying is they require special treatement. Have they been ignored? Yes, yes they have. Is this bill going to change that? No. It's going to be a long social overhaul. Maybe we could start by looking at Thomas Jefferson as a person, an intriguing one with all sorts of perspective on the issue of equality.
This has come up recently in regards to the Barry Bonds issue. I've heard it said that whites are afraid of Bonds passing Babe Ruth because Ruth is a "white hero". Sorry, I like Ruth because he was a fat slovenly drunk who could still hit the hell out of baseball. The drugs he took were certainly not performance enhancers as opposed to Barry "the Clear" Bonds.
Like you said, Plato said that there was no love purer than the love between a man and a young boy. Is that gay? Should we ignore him because he was a pedophile? It was a totally different ball game back then. And it's changing even now.
As a society we need to stop putting so much emphasis on things like this. I'm heterosexual, but you don't see me marching down the street about how proud I am. Why? Because I'm proud of my other accomplishments. My sexuality, race and ethnicity are not my defining characteristics. I'd rather be known as Brian the funny drunk than Brian the white guy or Brian the straight guy.
Just a thought of course.
Not everything was done by a white male, as you mentioned there are a few notable exceptions in US history. Of course in world history courses there are many more notable exceptions, not that we here in the US care all that much about the rest of the world. It's a different ballgame ignoring the contributions of immigrants (many illegal) to this country in its formative years than it is to teach about culturally created things such as sexuality.
Then again I could be hungover as a wolverine