Yet, when the Standards were published, in 1994, a big-tent effort transformed into a ferocious political fight.
Bush Administration, the venture took around three years and two million dollars to complete, and involved every relevant constituency, including parents, teachers, school administrators, curriculum specialists, librarians, educational organizations, and professional historians. The Standards were a colossal project: the country’s first attempt at establishing a nationally recognized set of criteria for how history should be taught. One arrived in the mid-nineties, when a debate flared in the media over the National Standards for History. Two recent history wars offer cautionary tales. We call them wars because they matter nations have risen and fallen on the success of their stories. But this is where the history wars, old and new, merely begin. Should the discipline forge effective citizens? Should it be a source of patriotism? Should it thrive on analysis and argument, or be an art that emotionally moves us? Should it seek to understand a whole society, or be content to uncover that society’s myriad parts? The answer to all of these questions is essentially yes. (The endurance of the Lost Cause ideology, which argues that the South fought not for slavery but for sovereignty, is one example.) But the broader problem is that, in the realm of public history, no settled law governs.
“Good” history can be both a result and a casualty of these wars. Finally, someone declares victory, whether by creating or removing a monument, cancelling or curating an exhibit, or writing a book about a triumph of historical engagement. The politics of knowledge and the emotional attachments to country threaten to sweep up nearly all before them. Authorities, whether in academia, libraries, or museums, try to fight for up-to-date research and interpretation. Political teams are chosen, and the media both fuels and thrives on the contestation. The combatants then employ a kind of existential rhetoric, with all sides declaring surrender unacceptable. The disputes quickly invoke curricula, creeping into school boards and state legislatures with increasing stakes. The subjects at their core usually carry visceral meaning for large swaths of the public. This is especially true as we limp, wounded, from the battlefields of the Trump era, when facts were nearly rendered irrelevant. In April, the Department of Education called for a renewed stress, in the classroom, on the “unbearable human costs of systemic racism” and the “consequences of slavery.” In response, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell issued a formal letter, demanding more “patriotism” in history and calling the Democrats’ plan “divisive nonsense.” Like all great questions of national memory, the latest history war has to play out in politics, whether we like it or not.
Once again, Americans find themselves at war over their history-what it is, who owns it, how it should be interpreted and taught. But old feuds remind us that history is continually revised, driven by new evidence and present-day imperatives. A new battle is being waged over how we teach our country’s past.