THE LAWRENCE F. BREWSTER

Presented by Gary B. Nash

November 1996

EAST CAROLINA UNIVERSITY

GREENVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA 27858-4353

Introduction

The Lawrence E Brewster Lecture in History is sponsored annually by the East Carolina University Department of History. The first Brewster Lecture was presented in 1982 as part of the University's seventy-fifth anniversary celebration; the lectures have been published since 1984. The series bears the name of an esteemed Professor Emeritus of History who continues to offer his generous support to the Department and to the discipline at large.

The lecture series seeks to achieve four essential goals: to provide students, faculty, and members of the community the opportunity to hear distinguished historians share their knowledge and mastery of the discipline; to stimulate an exchange of ideas and a continuing dialogue about issues of fundamental importance to the people; to illuminate the present through the reflective prism of the past; and to support a critical requirement of modem times, the continuing process of education.

The 1996 Lawrence F. Brewster Lecture is delivered by Gary B. Nash, Professor of History at the University of California at Los Angeles. Professor Nash received his undergraduate and doctoral degrees from Princeton University; he has been a member of the history faculty at UCLA since 1966. He has published fifteen books, nineteen chapters in books, thirty-two articles, and a host of reviews and review essays. He has received many honors and awards, including the following: he served as a member of the Pulitzer Prize Jury for History in 1987 and twice served on the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize Committee. His book, Quakers and Politics: Pennsylvania, 1681-1726, was chosen by the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association as the best book published in 1970, and his The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History in 1979. In 1994-1995 he served as President of the Organization of American Historians.

From 1988 to 1994, Professor Nash served as Associate Director of the National Center for History in the Schools and, since 1994, as the Center's Director. Beginning in 1992, he co- chaired the National History Standards Project, which has undertaken the task of producing national standards for the teaching of history in primary and secondary schools. In the fifteenth annual Brewster Lecture, Professor Nash discusses the uproar surrounding the publication of the National History Standards as well as other events that have recently made our normally staid discipline so controversial. His lecture is entitled, "American History and American Democracy: The History Wars of the 1990s."

Roger Biles, Chair
Department of History

Gary B. Nash          

On January 18, 1995 the United States Senate resolved by a 99-1 vote that the voluntary National History Standards were offensive, harmful to young minds, and disrespectful to Western values and achievements. These were the standards created by scores of the nation's most decorated teachers and some of its most eminent historians. They were certified by more than thirty national organizations of teachers, administrators, curriculum specialists, librarians, parents, and historians. The world's most powerful deliberative body voted without reading the standards, without holding hearings on them, without consulting anyone who had participated in creating them, and without debating their actual content.

The resolution, to be sure, was a brokered deal. Democrats agreed to it as a devil's pact to remove a punitive secondary amendment to the Unfunded Mandates Act that would have had legal force in denying any federal funding to UCLA's National Center for History in the Schools (NCHS), established by Lynne Cheney six years before. The secondary amendment would also have prevented the Department of Education's Goals 2000 project from funding states to develop voluntary history standards based on NCHS's work.

Three months later, the Senate resolved unanimously that the script for an Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian, much revised after intense consultations with Air Force and American Legion critics, was "revisionist, unbalanced, and offensive." The resolution was accompanied by unsubtle threats to slash both the Smithsonian's budget and the throat of its Air and Space Museum director, Martin Harwit, an eminent astrophysicist from Cornell. The Smithsonian's director canceled the exhibit; the Air and Space Museum director resigned; and the Senate cut the Smithsonian budget, asserting, in effect, the Senate's readiness to decide what exhibits were appropriate for the American public to see.

How do we make sense of these two Senate resolutions, and what do they tell us about American democracy and American history? The three themes in this essay emerge from my own involvement over the last few years in controversies concerning what our children are taught--or might be taught-- in the schools. First, I contend, that only in recent years has the historical guild emerged from a narrowly constructed, blinkered group who wrote wonderfully well in some areas, but ignored important segments of American society and so thoroughly averted its glance from some of the most trenchant parts of our history that it cannot be said to have produced a balanced or democratically conceived history Second, that even a patrician guild, thoroughly dominated by white Protestant males, came under ferocious attack earlier in this century in times of widespread popular anxiety. Rehearsing and remembering these attacks fortifies us in resisting those who do not honor critical thinking, open-mindedness, and the open discussion of ideas, including alternative interpretations about how the past unfolded. Third, I reflect on a central paradox: that the emergence of a democratized historical practice in recent decades has brought forth a torrent of critics who have misled and confused much of the public about the nature of historical scholarship and the benefits of revising history.

In order to appraise the controversies over history today, it is appropriate to examine how the history profession has changed and to sample a few aspects of the history produced by an earlier generation. In the context of arguments today over multicultural education, it is important to realize how unicultural the profession was until after World War II. Before then, history writing was the province of white gentlemen. Though certainly varied in their historical interests, political proclivities, and methodological approaches, historians partook deeply of the scientific racism of their day, had little interest in women's role in history, and were largely indifferent to labor history. Fifty years ago, a college student might sit through a year of history lectures and rarely or never hear the words women, 'workers," "Jews," or any designation for African Americans.

The tenor of the early historical profession can be appreciated by considering the characterization of African Americans penned in 1902 by John Burgess, a leading figure at Columbia University: "A black skin means membership in a race of men which has never of itself succeeded in subjecting passion to reason." ¹ This was a comment that would have occasioned little controversy among historians. Indeed, such beliefs governed textbook coverage of African Americans and slavery through the 1950s. Henry Steele Commager and Samuel Eliot Morison's best-selling The Growth of the American Republic is typical in its presentation of chattel slavery. All four million enslaved Africans had one name. "Sambo," they wrote, "whose wrongs moved the abolitionists to wrath and tears... suffered less than any other class in the South from its 'peculiar institution' .... The majority of slaves... were apparently happy.... There was much to be said for slavery as a transitional status between barbarism and civilization."²

This representation became standard textbook fare. Students grew up learning that enslaved Africans transported from a cultureless continent left their homelands in chains almost eagerly since they would look forward to the benefits of civilized society on the other side of the Atlantic. It was such textbooks that roused the fury of W.E.B. Du Bois, the Harvard- trained historian who wrote bitterly in 1935: "I... [am] literally aghast at what American historians have done to this field.... [It] is one of the most stupendous efforts the world ever saw to discredit human beings, an effort involving universities, history, science, social life, and religion."³

The voices of black scholars such as Du Bois did little to alter the "wild savage" depiction of Africans, which provided students a handy rationalization of the most massive forced migration of humans in the annals of history As late as the 1950s, California's fifth graders learned about how the chattel slavery system operated benignly in the plantation South:

Perhaps the most fun the little masters and mistresses have comes when they are free to play with the little colored boys and girls. Back of the big house stand rows of small cabins. In these cabins live the families of Negro slaves. The older colored people work on the great farm, or help about the plantation home. The small black boys and girls play about the small houses. They are pleased to have the white children come to play with them.⁴

Students reading this description could easily imagine that enslaved Africans would be contented in this pleasant world. Their textbook confirmed this:

In time many people came to think that it was wrong to own slaves. Some of them said that all the Negro slaves should be freed. Some of the people who owned slaves became angry at this. They said that the black people were better off as slaves in America than they would have been as wild savages in Africa. Perhaps this was true, as many of the slaves had snug cabins to live in, plenty to eat, and work that was not too hard for them to do. Most of the slaves seemed happy and contented.⁵

In some states, such lessons from history on African Americans and race relations endured well into the Vietnam War years. Fourth graders in Alabama, for example, whether black or white, learned that under "terrible carpetbag rule" during Reconstruction, freed slaves were so ignorant that they bought colored sticks from mercenary northern carpetbaggers in the belief that "they could own the land where they put those sticks." They also learned that "loyal white men," "trying to protect their families," formed the Ku Klux Klan "to bring back law and order." Never violent, the Klansmen protected Alabamians from "bad lawless things," convinced the "lawless men who had taken control of the state" to go back North, and persuaded "the Negroes who had been fooled by the false promises of the carpetbaggers to get themselves jobs and settle down to make an honest living."⁶

The historical treatment of other subordinate groups in American history is similarly out of character for a nation that regards itself as the world's leading democracy. My own introduction to Indian history began with a book on King Philip's War in 1676, the bloodiest Indian war in the first 150 years of American history. In the introduction to Douglas Leach's Flintlock and Tomahawk, Samuel Eliot Morison wrote: "In view of our recent experiences of warfare [the Korean War] and of the many instances today of backward peoples getting enlarged notions of nationalism and turning ferociously on Europeans who have attempted to civilize them, this early conflict of the same nature cannot help but be of interest."⁷

If we turn to the presentation of women in history over the first three centuries of history writing in this country, from the first seventeenth-century Puritan historians to the 1960s, we do not find such demeaning characterizations or such thinly veiled hostility. Rather, we find mostly a record of historical amnesia. To be sure, women have not been entirely absent from historical accounts, but the record is very thin. It is equally thin on laboring people, on the labor movements that embraced millions of Americans from the 1820s forward, and on labor's struggle for dignity, decent wages, and humane working conditions.

In trying to make sense of the culture wars of the 1990s, Americans need to remember that, while our keepers of the past were writing many schoolbooks that ignored or demeaned women and minority groups as well as laboring people in general, some historians were attempting to break this mold. This began as early as the 1920s when a small number of historians revolted against the deeply racist treatments of African Americans and the silence on women in history. For example, in an essay on "The Role of Women in American History," Arthur Schlesinger tried to steer a new course:

An examination of the standard histories of the United States and of the history textbooks in use in our schools raises the pertinent question whether women have ever made any contributions to American national progress that are worthy of record. If the silence of the historians is taken to mean anything, it would appear that one-half of our population have been negligible factors in our country's history.⁸

Schlesinger saw that the thoroughly male composition of the profession explained this remarkable "pall of silence" about women in history. "It should not be forgotten," he wrote, "that all of our great historians have been men and were likely therefore to be influenced by a sex interpretation of history all the more potent because unconscious."⁹

Though pioneers such as Schlesinger began to create a new agenda before World War II for what young Americans might know about the nation's past, they were tapping on a door that would open only slightly. It was not until the 1950s that historians began to revamp textbook accounts of slavery, the African past, the Reconstruction era, gender relations, labor history, popular culture, and a host of other topics previously regarded as too dangerous to handle or simply irrelevant. This scholarship proceeded slowly Working in the Cold War era, a new band of dissident historians had to swim against the tide of consensus history that was minimizing conflict and ideological differences in the American past and promoting the idea of American "exceptionalism"-that the United States had developed as a uniquely free and opportunity-filled nation.

When young post-war challengers arrived on the scene, partly as a result of the GI Bill that put higher education within reach of an unheard of proportion of young Americans (hence creating a need for a vastly enlarged professorate), old-school historians jealously guarded their turf. As late as 1962, the president of the American Historical Association, trying to hold back the tide, deplored "the great mutation" in Cijo's profession. "Many of the younger practitioners of our craft," wrote Carl Bridenbaugh, "are products of lower middle-class or foreign origins, and their emotions not infrequently get in the way of historical reconstructions." Most of those who heard Bridenbaugh's address understood that his references to "products of lower middle-class or foreign origins" meant Jews-those who in Bridenbaugh's words suffered from an "environmental deficiency" because they were urban-bred and rooted in the old world traditions of their parent's homelands in eastern Europe, and therefore lacking in the "understanding vouchsafed to historians who were raised in the countryside or in the small town...."¹⁰

Presidents of professional organizations can deplore and lament, but they cannot alter structural changes occurring around them in society at large. The equivalent of a geological tectonic plate shift rearranged the terrain of many professions after World War II, history included, with doors opening to people bearing CI benefits and high hopes that far exceeded that of their parents. Slowly out of this change would come a far more inclusive and realistic history that young Americans would learn in school. A changing, dynamic profession began to follow Oscar Wilde's dictum: "The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it."

The changes overtaking the profession went largely unnoticed by the public because the shifting composition of graduate school programs and newly published monographs hardly merited newspaper headlines, op-ed expose's, or television news soundbites. But like the movement of glaciers, the shifts were slowly transforming the landscape. It is not surprising that new questions about the past would be posed by people representing segments of the American mosaic who had not been part of the story-telling. Step by step, new historians began to construct previously untold chapters of history and, along the way, helped to overcome the deep historical biases that for many generations had afflicted a narrowly constituted profession.

Even a sociologically narrow profession found that piecemeal revisionism could bring the furies against them in ways that warn us today of authoritarian wolves cloaked in populist sheepskins. Controversy over the "R" word, revisionism, used today as a growling epithet, has a long genealogy. For many generations, Americans have been involved in faceoffs over what history children should learn in school. Perhaps it cannot be otherwise since history is a touchstone of contemporary concerns and a mirror that we hold before us to see who we are, where we came from, and where we are going. So long as history is a fluid, dynamic field, it will always uneasily commingle commemoration and critique. Americans have never agreed on a single, unified version of our past nor should they if the nation is to remain democratic. Nor can anyone find a people anywhere in the world who agree on the course of their national history. Like Americans, other nationalities vigorously debate heroes and villains, high points and low points, tragic mistakes and towering successes.

Today's ultraconservative gunslingers preach that Americans have had a unified history and a common understanding of the past, 'from Mayflower Rock to de Tocqueville to Norman Rockwell's paintings," as Newt Gingrich puts it.¹¹ Bob Dole, running hard for the Republican presidential nomination, told the American Legionnaires on Labor Day in 1995 that a generation of historians (who restored women, ordinary people, and non-white citizens to our national story) were members of "intellectual elites who seem embarrassed by America."¹²

This first law of Newtonian Cliodynamics is, of course, absurd. Arguments over the American Revolution, to dwell for a moment on that momentous event from which we emerged as a nation, began approximately one day after the Peace of Paris Treaty was signed. John Adams croaked in exasperation that:

The history of our Revolution will be one continued lie from one end to the other. The essence of the whole will be that Dr. Franklin's electric rod smote the earth and out sprang George Washington. That Franklin electrified him with his rod, and henceforward these two conducting all the policy negotiations, legislatures, and war.¹³

The debates over the origins, character, and results of the American Revolution continued throughout the careers of the founding fathers. Debaters argued furiously about the Revolution and one another's role in it. Adams lamented "the superstitious veneration that is sometimes paid to General Washington," thinking that "I feel myself his Superior.¹⁴ He also thought that Franklin, whom he loved to call "the great Deceiver" and "the old Conjurer," was vastly overrated.¹⁵ The nation's second president was reduced to sputtering when someone asked him his opinion of Thomas Paine, whose Common Sense galvanized the vacillating public and the Continental Congress in early 1776 to declare independence from mighty England. Paine was "a mongrel between pig and puppy, begotten by a wild boar on a bitch wolf... Never before in any age of the world" was such a "poltroon" allowed "to run through such a career of mischief."¹⁶

Jefferson also took his lumps-and administered a few. He regarded Adams as impossible: "He hates Franklin, he hates Jay, he hates the French, he hates the English," wrote Jefferson in 1783.¹⁷ Adams returned the favor. After losing to Jefferson in the presidential campaign of 1800, Adams called Jefferson so "warped by prejudice and so blinded by ignorance as to be unfit for the office he holds."¹⁸ New England's Congregational ministers especially hated the atheistic third president. One predicted that the silly Americans "will rue the day and detest the folly, delusion, and intrigue which raised him to the head of the United States."¹⁹ Other clergymen bombarded their congregations with descriptions of Jefferson as an adulterous atheist and a toadying lover of the hopelessly corrupt French, whose revolution was as lovable as a plague.

Leaping forward over more than a century of contested history, including battles royale over how to interpret the Civil War for schoolchildren, depending on whether they lived in the North or South, one finds volcanic debates over revising textbook history. For example, in 1921, superpatriots suddenly discovered that David Saville Muzzey, the emerging textbook titan of this country, was writing high school "treason texts."

Muzzey was one of the newly professionalized historians of the Progressive Era who made their own contributions to democracy. It was they who initiated the first era of critical thinking in the schools. Until this point, as Ruth Miller Elson, the best historian of nineteenth- century textbooks, tells us, "The world created in... schoolbooks is essentially a world of fantasy-a fantasy made up by adults as a guide for their children, but inhabited by no one outside the pages of textbooks."²⁰ Muzzey, teaching at Columbia, was part of the rise of social science research, which was transforming colleges that had been mostly boys schools for the wealthy, into modem universities.

Muzzey's success as a textbook writer rested on his lively prose and firm grip on the new scholarship emanating from the likes of Arthur Schlesinger, Sr., James Truslow Adams, Andrew McLaughlin, Claude Van Tyne, and Woodrow Wilson. First published in 1911, Muzzey's plainly titled American History achieved a decade of success. Then the panegyrics broke loose in 1921. Led by a Hearst syndicate writer, verbal firing squads flooded the press with descriptions of Muzzey's textbook as "unfit for public-school use because [it was] subversive of American spirit," "grossly defamatory," "filled with alien allegiances," and poisoned by "distortions, perversions and outright falsification of vital historical truths" and "sneering deprecations" of the nation's founders.²¹

In a period of broad labor unrest amidst the "Red Scare" following World War I, one might imagine that Muzzey's sins were related to his radical interpretation of American history. But the author of Treason to the American Tradition and The Poisoned Loving- Cup charged Muzzey with perverse Anglophilia mixed with dangerous ideas about world peace. The wretched "revisionists," wrote Charles Miller, "minimize or omit many of the vital principles, heroes, and incidents of the Revolution, hitherto held sacred in American history." As detestable as was Benedict Arnold, "his weapon was sword against sword in a man- to-man warfare. But the treason of today insidiously directs against the minds of our children the poison gas of alien propaganda to deaden patriotic spirit and stupefy the national soul into unthinking submission to unknown imperialist designs."²² Miller discovered that almost every textbook was treasonous. For example, Albert Bushnell Hart told children that before the Stamp Act crisis of 1765 "the colonists liked to think of themselves as part of the British empire... and were proud of being Britons."²³ Muzzey poisoned children by telling them that "the Tories or Loyalists were champions on one side of a debatable question, namely whether the abuses of the King's ministers justified armed resistance."²⁴ "Such schoolmen," asserted Miller, "owe their promotion and their attitude of mind to the organized influences which seek to undermine the American spirit." The youth of America would march to "Yankee Doodle Dandy," not England's "God Save the King."²⁵

The Muzzey controversy gradually faded amid the prosperity of the 1920s, with the last stages of the rearguard fight carried out in Chicago in 1927 when Mayor William Thompson launched a belated attack on allegedly pro-British textbooks. But by this time Chicagoans were more concerned about Prohibition and the reign of Al Capone. One cartoon brought bathtub gin and history textbooks together to poke Mayor Thompson in the eye. A Chicago cop pulls over a suspicious-looking truck and demands to know what the trucker is carrying. "Only booze," the trucker replies, "Drive on, brother," says the policeman, "I thought it was history books."²⁶

Muzzey's books sold wildly after this scrape with the superpatriots and by the 1930s were the reigning schoolbooks from which American children learned their history. One of his challengers, Harold Rugg, soon tasted a whiff of grapeshot himself. Like Muzzey, Rugg was an unlikely enemy of the public. A ninth-generation New Englander who worked as a weaver in a Massachusetts textile mill in order to understand industrial labor and the quality of life at the bottom of the social hierarchy, Rugg also taught at Columbia University.

Rugg drew ideas and strategies from Progressivism that would nourish the innate creative abilities in young learners. Rummaging through many disciplines, he took inspiration from Van Wyck Brooks, Thorstein Veblen, R. H. Tawney, John R. Commons, Charles E. Merriam, and others among the leading historians, social scientists, educators, and cultural critics of the new century. Rugg contrasted these intellectual draughts with his own arid childhood education at the hands of school-ruling traditionalists who worshipped at the altar of social conformity. He wrote:

The narrow physical inheritance [of New England] had produced its counterpart in the circumscribed mental horizon of the people. Life was thin and arid like the soil; norm domineered over the spirit. All social forces-home, community, and education-made for acquiescence, molding my contemporaries and myself to the standards of adult life. Independence of thought was minimized; loyalty was canonized.²⁷

Like Muzzey, Rugg paid little attention to women's role in history or to black Americans and race relations. But on labor and labor struggle, he was more forthcoming. Like Muzzey, he was fully committed to John Dewey's educational agenda, which had been embraced by most of the teaching corps of America. The agenda of the progressive educators was to replace the traditional pedagogy that stressed rote memorization, rigid discipline, and passive learning with a flexible, child-centered, functional social learning.

Rugg's contribution to the nation's classrooms was a twenty- book social studies series called Man and His Changing Society. To this series he brought fragments of the emerging social and economic history, thus leavening a politically dominated curricular loaf. Also, Rugg stressed "open-mindedness" and "critical mindedness." He urged teachers to pursue the goal of "tolerant understanding." "Make constant use," he counseled, "of phrases such as 'Why do you think so?;' 'Are you open-minded about the matter?;' 'What is your authority?;' 'Have you considered all sides of the case?"'²⁸ Rugg also made contributions to world history and culture. His Changing Civilizations in the Modern World focused on the histories and contemporary geography of ten countries--Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, Japan, India, China, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile--and gave fairly balanced and respectful treatment to all of them.

From the perspective of the 1990s, Rugg's explorations of American and world history appear carefully constructed and ideologically mild, yet they were far in advance of fellow textbook authors in many of the open-ended questions that he posed. For example, in a section entitled "The Red Man's Continent" in A History of American Civilization he asked:

In what spirit did the Indians and the Europeans receive each other? Did the white men buy the Indians' land that they settled upon? ... Again ask yourself whether it was possible for two widely differing civilizations to live side by side in the same region. Consider the ethical problem: Was it right for the more numerous Europeans to drive back the scattered tribes of Indians?²⁹

By the mid-1930s, Rugg's widely admired books, constituting altogether some 25,000 pages of printed material, had sold several million copies in thousands of school districts. Then he came under attack. Squads of patrioteers, who in the 1920s berated Muzzey and others for allegedly being pro-British, shifted their ground to assail Rugg for spreading Communist lies. Along with Carl Becker's textbooks on world history, Rugg was attacked as a "collectivist" who wrote "subversive textbooks that promoted Marxist teachings."³⁰ Rugg was in fact a leader at Columbia in condemning a Communist faction of the faculty, but this meant nothing to another Hearst writer, Bertie Forbes, who spearheaded the attack on him.³¹ Quickly enlisting the American Legion, Forbes was gratified by the eve of Pearl Harbor to see the Legion punctuating the press with Rugg-beating articles and vicious cartoons. In one article, "Treason in the Textbooks," a cartoon displayed a leering teacher pouring slime on four books labeled "Constitution," "Religion," "U. S. Heroes," and "U.S. History," while puzzled boys and girls looked askance.³²

The attacks on Rugg turned into a crusade to purge certain books from public schools because of their reputed anti-Americanism and "creeping collectivism." Proof of this charge was found in Rugg's books where he recommended discussion on whether all Americans shared in the rising standard of living that had resulted from the development of industrial capitalism. Writing in the midst of the Great Depression, Rugg challenged teachers to link the present with past developments. For his critics, however, any mention of American problems would produce sullen and cynical young Americans. Yet from today's perspective, it is notable that Rugg entirely omitted discussing the chronic industrial warfare that punctuated the 1870s through the 1920s. Even to discuss how the rapid increase in worker wages from 1850-1900 slowed and how income by the late 1920s was very unevenly distributed was enough to bring indictments for textbook treason. In one of the sharpest attacks, he was accused of trying "to give a child an unbiased viewpoint instead of teaching him real Americanism. All the old histories taught my country right or wrong," proclaimed the corresponding secretary of the Daughters of the Colonial Wars. "That's the point of view we want our children to adopt. We can't afford to teach them to be unbiased and let them make up their own minds."³³

The assaults on Rugg were far better organized and more strenuous than the attacks on the Progressive historians of the 1920s. The stakes, everyone knew, were high. Since 1895, high school education had taken a gigantic leap forward. Once restricted to the top five percent of teenage Americans, by the 1930s it embraced the great majority. When William McKinley became president in 1897, some 210,000 young Americans attended about 2,600 high schools. In 1935, on the eve of Franklin D. Roosevelt's second term, six million American teenagers attended about 29,000 schools. In the view of the far right, it was calamitous to encourage an entire generation of youngsters to question and interpret the nation's righteous narrative of progress.

World War II intervened, but Rugg's books, banned and burned in many communities, were driven from the marketplace, leaving Muzzey's books as the postwar favorites. Another round of textbook trials occurred during the Mccarthyite fevers of the late 1950s and 1960s. The Daughters of the American Revolution examined every school textbook on the market in 1961 and testified that 170 of 220 of them were subversive, as evidenced by pictures of American slums or of twisting lines of the unemployed during the Great Depression; by attention to subjects such as the United Nations, mental health, or prejudice; and by music books with "too many 'work tunes' and 'folk songs'(as distinguished from native and national airs)." Equally offensive to the DAR were mentions of further reading that steered students to the writings of "liberal, racial, socialist, or labor agitators." Among these were the works of Theodore White, Margaret Mead, Richard Wright, Ruth Benedict, Matthew Josephson, Louis Adamic, Lincoln Steffens, Pearl Buck, Langston Hughes, Norman Cousins, Allen Nevins, Burl Ives, and Bill Mauldin. Also unacceptable were "socialist slants" in textbook chapter subheadings such as "industrialization Brings Problems as Well as Benefits," "Congress Attempts to Curb the Trusts," and "Panics and Depression Become More Severe."³⁴

As McCarthyism played itself out, the nation turned its attention to improving the education offered its young. But this effort was not helped by the textbook publishers' reluctance to risk the kind of scorchings they had suffered periodically since the 1920s. The tendency of publishers in the 1960s was to expunge passages from textbooks that raised the ire of almost anyone. Che educator warned that the publishers "are so compliant that most of them would print the texts in Hindu [sic] if the buyers preferred. Their aim is to offend nobody."³⁵

If David Muzzey and Harold Rugg were alive today, they would find much in our history wars that would remind them of their own travails. Perhaps what they would notice first is the wholesale change in the profession. What Carl Bridenbaugh deplored in 1960 as the beginning of the "Great Mutation" has now become not simply the entry of Jews into the profession but the arrival of women and people from religious, ethnic, and racial groups. The former outsiders are now within the academic gates, and it will not do any longer to attack them as sociologically and temperamentally unsuited for Cho's tasks; rather, it is the history they write that has come under fire.

Opponents see the new history of women, laboring people, religious and racial minorities- sometimes lumped together under the rubric of social history-as creating a hopelessly chaotic version of the past in which no grand synthesis or overarching themes are possible to discern and all coherence is lost. Of course, the coherence and symmetry of the old master narratives is derived mostly from studying the experiences of only certain parts of American society or from grounding all the megahistorical constructs in the Western experience. The contribution of social historians is precisely to show that the overarching themes and grand syntheses promulgated by past historians will not hold up when we broaden our perspectives by including the history of all the people who have constituted American society If the rise of women's history, African American history, and labor history has created a crisis, we must ask "whose crisis?" It is not a crisis for those interested in women's history or an inclusive history because these historians know that they have been vastly enriched by the last generation's scholarship on such topics-to mention only a few-as the history of the family, the gendered history of the law, and how American religious history is expanded and fortified by studying women's roles. The crisis, in fact, exists mostly in the minds of those whose monopolistic hold on the property of history has been shattered. The older history, defended as more objective and coherent, was always subjective and selective in the organizing questions asked, the evidence consulted, and the conclusions drawn.

Laments that the grand synthesis and old coherence have been shattered are, in effect, a call for returning to the traditional master narratives-"a sacred story with strong nationalist overtones [that] derived much of its coherence from the groups it ignored or dismissed."³⁶ Gertrude Himmelfarb, a leading opponent of social history, finds it "difficult to see how the subjects of the new history can be accommodated in any single framework, let alone a national and political one. How can all these groups, each cherishing its uniqueness and its claim to sovereign attention, be mainstreamed into a single, coherent, integrated history?"³⁷ Leaving aside the faulty premise that historians of women or African Americans, or Mormons or Jews for that matter, demand "sovereign attention," and leaving aside the idealistic and simplistic notion that a single framework based on eternal verities has ever existed, it is important to take up the query about whether the many strands of social history can be made a part of a coherent single framework.

Is it possible to fit a plurality of stories and many jarring perspectives into a coherent understanding of the American past? Quite simply, the particularities of social history can be mainstreamed readily enough by changing the governing narrative from the rise of American democracy, defined in terms of electoral politics, to the struggle to put the American ideals of liberty, equal justice, and equality fully into practice. Such a new metanarrative, arising out of a democratized historical practice, is no more far-fetched than the opening words of the Constitution- 'to create a more perfect union."

The new story, to be sure, would speak to contests and conflicts over power, not just in polling booths and legislative chambers, but in all dimensions of life. It is not necessary in a mature democracy to be squeamish about this. The struggles among various groups to wrestle their way into the American dream has been difficult and often bloody, but why should young Americans be shielded from what their parents and grandparents can relate to them-and often do? The new synthesis emerging out of a generation of scholarship proceeds from the elementary notion that a democratic society deserves a democratic history where historians rescue from oblivion those who indisputably shared in building the nation's economy, fought for the nation, and prodded the nation to deliver on its promises to make America work for all its people. Is it not a coherent, integrated history that portrays "the dignity of common people who quietly struggle under difficult conditions and who, in large and small ways, refuse to submit passively to abuse, discrimination, and exploitation?"³⁸

Such a framework would set aside such textbook titles as The American Pageant, The Great Republic and Triumph of the American Nation replacing them with titles such as America Will Be, A More Perfect Union, The Challenge of Freedom, and A People and a Nation. Rather than triumphantly saluting a completed national agenda and celebrating an undiluted record of achievement, a new synthesis of the old political history and the new social history presents a nation receiving one wave of immigrants after another and engaged in an ongoing and often bittersweet campaign to narrow the gap between principles enunciated in charter documents and the actual conditions of life. Within this story there is plenty of room for the accomplishments of American nation- building, technological and scientific ingenuity, religious tolerance, economic development, international leadership, and artistic expression. Indeed, it is the promise of American life that has rankled the dispossessed and fueled the determination of those on the outside to wrestle their way into mainstream America.

It is one of the peculiarities of today's history wars that arch- conservatives have created scapegoats of social historians by branding them as an alien cultural elite. In this semantic sleight of hand, Bob Dole, presenting himself as a plain-folks truthteller, has attacked what he calls "a shocking campaign" by "liberal academic elites" to denigrate America's story while "sanitizing and glorifying other cultures."³⁹ But the so-called denigration is really only an extended disquisition on Ralph Waldo Emerson's memorable question: "What is man born for but to be a Reformer; a Remaker of what man has made; a renouncer of lies...."⁴⁰ Historians of the unnoticed masses in American history are hardly what Dole calls the "embarrassed to be American" crowd.⁴¹ Embarrassment is appropriate for those who hide history, but not suitable, at least in a democracy, for those who explore the past fully and frankly, even when it leads historians to the deepest recesses of violence, perfidy, avarice, and hatred.

Another peculiarity in the current history wars is that those who believe that particularistic studies of women, African Americans, ethnic and religious minorities, and plain folk of all kinds will balkanize America, have not reflected on whether groups that have been ignored or demeaned can be expected to feel part of the unum when they are not counted among the pluribus. Why should we expect Navajo, Cheyenne, Arapaho, or Sioux young people to love America if the story of Indian-white relations is sanitized or relegated to footnotes? Can we expect African American youngsters to celebrate America when the history of discrimination and institutionalized racism is avoided or downplayed while the text is silent on the many military, cultural, scientific, religious, economic, and social contributions of black Americans?

Sharp controversy over museum exhibits of late also deserves consideration because they parallel attacks on historical revisionism and pedagogical changes in the schools. What lesson can one learn from the 1991 cancellation of the Smithsonian's exhibit on The West as America in St. Louis and Denver-the decision that the people of these two large metropolitan areas should not be allowed to see the paintings of Frederic Remington, Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, George Caleb Bingham, George Catlin, Thomas Moran, Karl Bodmer, and others. Of course it was not the paintings that were radioactive; it was the labels accompanying the paintings and the mini-essays on the walls that introduced exhibit-goers to this spectacular array of western painting. The Smithsonian curators, reflecting the work of a booming school of new western historians, drew attention to the nineteenth-century ideologies of nationalism, racism, and imperialism that can be discerned in the painters' representations of the West. In the accompanying exhibit book, the curators began frankly

The story [of westward expansion] is disturbing rather than ennobling, for it goes against our desire to see art as the voice of innate goodness and high moral values. [The essayists in the book] have not been content to take images at face value, that is, as formal constructions of appealing composition and color. Rather they have delved into the subjects, the intentions of the artists and their patrons, and the history of westward expansion to unearth a deeper, troubling story that poses questions for American society today.... That American society still struggles to adjust to limitations on natural resources, to grant overdue justice to native populations, to locate the contributions of ethnic minorities within a mainstream tradition, and to resolve conflicts between unbridled personal freedom and the larger social good....⁴²

Such frank language elicits admiration from most parts of the world where museum directors and curators have no such freedom to explore important topics openly. But doing so in the world's leading democracy enveloped the Smithsonian curators with heavy-handed criticism. The first person to sign the visitor's book at the exhibit was the former Librarian of Congress, Daniel Boorstin. "A perverse, historically inaccurate, destructive exhibit," he huffed.⁴³ Anyone who might have read Boorstin's The Americans: The Colonial Experience, where one cannot find the word slavery in the index or indeed in the text of a book that purports to plumb the colonial experience, might characterize his book in the same way. "perverse, historically inaccurate, and destructive." But Boorstin's book was never purged from St. Louis and Denver libraries. Yet after his attack, a vociferous political assault led by Senators Ted Stevens of Alaska and Slade Gorton of Washington, who had not yet seen the exhibit, was launched to put the curators under pressure to rewrite the words on the wall. Even the use of such words as ^t'race," "sexual stereotype," and "class" provoked charges of political correctness. Under a barrage, curators rewrote some labels in an attempt to placate the critics. Nonetheless, St. Louis and Denver canceled the traveling exhibit with lame explanations of financial difficulties.

To open mythic versions of the West to diverse interpretations was now understood to be un- American, unacceptable, and reason enough to chop the Smithsonian budget. This pushed our national museum toward the precipice occupied by museum curators in totalitarian countries. As one historian has put it, in the context of the parallel attack on the National History Standards, "It is essential that all interpretations be open to testing by available evidence.... Abandon that principle to a mandated, politically desired conclusion and something much more important to historians than any particular alternative interpretation is lost- including the only sort of history from which a democratic society can hope to learn."⁴⁴

Despite the pragmatic and modulated approach to American history taken by the Smithsonian curators-hardly a wild-eyed group of radicals-it was plain that to open mythic versions of the past to new interpretation in a period of growing political conservatism was akin to painting targets on their backs. As the museum community recoiled from the thought of Congressional members censoring art exhibits and threatening funding cuts because historians and curators were doing what they had done since the time of Thucydides--reevaluating the past--an even more ferocious storm was brewing. While American and foreign visitors lined up for hours to see the West as America exhibit, Smithsonian curators were planning a commemoration of the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945. Scheduled to open in 1995 in the Air and Space Museum as a fiftieth anniversary observance, The Last Act: The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II was destined to become the most bitterly contested museum exhibition in American history. The Enola Gay controversy in 1994-95 provides another example of how the world's most powerful democracy is capable of entrapping itself in a dangerous spider's web.

The controversy over exhibiting Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the first A- bomb on Hiroshima, began in 1994 when the Air Force Association, joined by other veterans groups, mounted a blistering attack on the Smithsonian's script created by curators in consultation with a panel of expert historians. No doubt some of these historians were insensitive to how the exhibit would offend those who fought in World War II, and one can understand how photographs of charred women and children in Hiroshima might arouse ideas that the Japanese were victims rather than military aggressors in the war. Through many meetings and many revisions, the curators and advisory board members redressed most of the problems in a sane, deliberative way. But the veterans' groups still found it unacceptable that visitors should encounter any indication of the moral and political dimensions of Truman's decision to drop the bomb. When Smithsonian officials agreed to eliminate all references to the weighty debate in Truman's inner circle over the advantages and disadvantages of dropping the bomb, historians retorted that the script was being "historically cleansed." One member of the exhibit's advisory committee went to the heart of the problem:

Unfortunately, the eagerness of critics to demonize the Smithsonian obscured a central issue: the inevitable tension between the commemorative voice and the historical voice when history becomes the focus of a public exhibit.... Those who believe that the National Air and Space Museum was a temple whose function was to celebrate American technology wanted an exhibit that would commemorate the atomic bomb as the redemptive ending of a horrible war.... Those who believed that the museum was a forum whose function was to present diverse interpretations of complex historical events wanted an exhibit that would discuss the 50-year old controversy about the decision to drop the bomb, remind visitors of the devastation caused by it, and underscore the enduring nuclear danger.⁴⁵

The election of November 1994 sharply intensified the debate and reduced the maneuvering room for a satisfactory compromise. Ultraconservatives on Capitol Hill, emboldened by the Republican capture of both houses of Congress, turned up the heat on the Smithsonian's curators, insisting that the Air Force veterans had the most legitimate claim to how history is presented. The controversy ended only when the Smithsonian director decided to scale back the exhibit to a simple display of the Enola Gay fuselage with an identifying plaque and little commentary of any kind, and when the Air and Space Museum director, Martin Harwit, an astrophysicist from Cornell, resigned under pressure.

The decision to cancel carried a very heavy price. Curators around the country have been asking themselves: can we present a historical exhibit unless it passes a Congressional litmus test? Can the presentation of ideas, including alternative ideas and conflicting memories about a single event, survive a new cultural climate where an Arctic pressure front is enough to bury an exhibit? Is it beyond the capacity of a democratic people to partake of enshrined artifacts while at the same time appreciating alternative historical interpretations based on contextualizing the hallowed artifacts? Is Jefferson's educated citizenry, essential to the life of a republic, strengthened or weakened by viewing the Enola Gay "as the Air Force's moral equivalent of a sacred battlefield" while simultaneously pondering evidence that Truman listened to those, including Dwight Eisenhower and Admiral William Leahy, key advisors, who counseled against dropping the bomb?

A New York Times editorial drove to the heart of the matter:

It is understandable that veterans who fought in the war and might have been ordered to invade Japan view the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a life-saving reprieve. To question the decision, even in a balanced exhibit, may strike them as unpatriotic. But the real betrayal of American tradition would be to insist on a single version of history or to make it the property of the state or any group. History in America is based on freedom of inquiry and discussion, which is one reason why Americans have given their lives to defend it.⁴⁶

The Enola Gay affair signaled that by 1995 politicians were prepared to proclaim what is historically correct or incorrect-in other words to create "official history." Che observer of the museum wars has concluded that "curators at the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress operate entirely in a realm of politics now, with projects driven more by the absence of their power to offend than by the strength of their ideas."⁴⁷

The Enola Gay debacle laid bare a disturbing double standard raised in attacks on historical revisionism, where new research and fresh interpretations became known as "kidnapping history" and the work of pernicious, antipatriotic "history thieves." The anti- revisionists, who wanted the Enola Gay exhibit to leave hallowed memories undisturbed by questions about the moral considerations discussed at the time in dropping the A-bomb or considerations about its postwar impact, wanted other nations' textbooks thoroughly revised in covering World War II. Russian, German, and Japanese children should learn about such events as the Russian appeasement of Hitler the Russian secret police slaughter of 21,000 Polish army officers, the Ukrainian genocide against Kiev's Jews, the Japanese enslavement of Korean women for sexual services for Japanese soldiers, the Nazi Holocaust, and much more. Almost all Americans agree that teachers in Japan, Germany, and Russia should present and discuss these topics. But some Americans believe that our children should squint rather than look squarely at the dark chapters of our own history.

In such a climate, the credo of the Association of American Museums, along with the work of the history profession, is in considerable danger. The relevant passage in that credo states: "Museums are places where the members of a pluralistic society may contemplate, reflect, and learn, and where we may examine not only the evidence of what affirms our values, but at times what challenges them."⁴⁸ If the winds of ultrapatriotism, of the sort we have seen in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1960s continue to blow, then museums will return to mausoleums for presenting "sacred icons for reverential observation," as the director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History expressed it.⁴⁹ It is the peculiar advantage of a democracy to make museums into places of learning, questioning, and debating, as well as shrines of amor patriae. If museums can no longer define their role by introducing new ideas and perspectives and by providing interpretive material based on sound scholarship, then how will our museums differ from those in authoritarian countries? The European historian Joan Scott points out that "there can be no democracy worthy of the name that does not entertain criticism, that suppresses disagreement, that refuses to acknowledge difference as inevitably disruptive of consensus, and that vilifies the search for new knowledge...."⁵⁰

The swirling controversy over the voluntary National History Standards in the last two years can be fully understood only by taking into account two phenomena: first, the nation's periodic disputes over what young students should learn about history; and, second, how history has become a contested terrain in the last decade, reflecting in part the diversification of the profession. In both cases, what has been at stake is nothing less than the ownership of history. In the culture wars of recent years, hardcore conservatives have employed a vocabulary that acknowledges the property of history. Thus, the teachers and scholars who produced the National History Standards were called "history thieves" or "history bandits" who "hijacked history" with no regard for truth and objectivity. For Newt Gingrich, "there has been a calculated effort by cultural elites to discredit the [American] civilization and replace it with a culture of irresponsibility that is incompatible with American freedoms as we have known them."⁵¹ The term "cultural elite" accurately describes the nation's historians at the beginning of this century-a homogeneous guild composed overwhelmingly by white male Protestant gentlemen. But today's historians can be characterized as an elite only in terms of their long and strenuous training in doctoral programs, a requirement for appointment and advancement in colleges and universities. In terms of gender, race, ethnicity, religion, and social background, the profession's heterogeneity distinguishes it sharply from yesteryear's historians. Never has the history profession looked more like America than today, though it is still disfavored by the brightest minority baccalaureate recipients who opt mostly for schools of law, business, and medicine.

It is hard to imagine why this diverse body of historians would be interested in fostering irresponsibility. Most historians are quiet reformers. They have warts like people in other professions, and they are as capable as bankers, accountants, and surgeons of pettiness, backbiting, and self-interest. But a profession now generously populated by women and by ethnic, racial, and religious minorities has been in the business of recapturing parts of the American past about which we have suffered a severe case of historical amnesia. in a democratic nation that prizes inclusiveness rather than exclusivity, today's history profession is more appropriately described as a "culture of responsibility." Most historians today believe that revising history through greater inclusion of forgotten Americans is much more likely to promote greater unity among variegated Americans than the old master narratives that demeaned or ignored large segments of the population.

Returning to the controversy over the National History Standards, we can consider again the question of "who owns history." Since the standards are meant to provide a framework built out of the most respected and responsible scholarship of recent decades-a framework that is available for school districts and states to use in revamping their curriculums in the interest of greater historical literacy-they can be regarded as an important piece of intellectual property. Hence it is fair to ask how this property was created and who invested intellectual capital in its construction.

Rush Limbaugh's millions of television and radio listeners heard that the National History Standards were created by "a secret group at UCLA." On the stump, Pat Buchanan, running for the Republican presidential nomination, assured crowds of citizens that the standards were the work of bead-wearing, sandaled, leftover radicals from the 1960s who want their children to turn out just like them. John Fonte, Lynne Cheney's spokesperson, claimed that the author of this essay was the "principal architect" and "primary author" of the history standards. Yet it is common knowledge that the standards were written by three task forces of teachers, drawn equally from elementary, middle, and high schools. These teachers worked with a battery of historians in world and United States history, and the resulting collaborative work was reviewed, draft by draft, by thirty-three national organizations. Included among these organizations were the American Historical Association, the National Council for Social Studies, the American Catholic Educational Association, the American Association of School Librarians, the Organization of American Historians, the Organization of History Teachers, and the American Association for State and Local History. Overseeing the entire operation, mediating revision and restructuring, was a national council of thirty members drawn from the major organizations involved and supplemented by noted scholars and highly respected teachers from Alaska to Florida. Many of the members of the national council were nominated by Lynne Cheney herself.

Just as the last half-century has witnessed a redistribution of the property of history, the attempts to build a broad consensus behind a set of national history standards reflected this redistribution. As Carol Gluck, historian of Japan at Columbia University and a member of the national council, put it: "If the standards were hijacked at all, they were hijacked by America, through an admirable process of open debate that could probably only happen in the United States."⁵²

When arch-conservatives read the history standards-or listened to frightening accounts of them-they took offense at what Lynne Cheney called "a grim and gloomy" rendition of American history and a de-emphasis of Western civilization in world history. The hundreds of history educators involved in constructing the standards recognized that restoring African Americans to history necessarily involved much that is sordid and tragic in our past. Similarly, those who wrote the standards understood that the inclusion of Native Americans, Mexican Americans, Japanese Americans, laboring Americans, and women would bring to the attention of students much that fits uncomfortably in a happy-face history curriculum. inclusion of such material as the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, McCarthyism, and the internment of 110,000 Japanese Americans during World War II was thought by writers of the standards as entirely appropriate. But this produced fulminous debates that often boiled down to two sharply differing views about the role of history in nurturing amor patriae. For some, patriotism must be undiluted and unequivocal. In this view, history that dwells on horrific, or even unsavory, episodes in our past is unpatriotic because it will presumably alienate young students from their own country. Youngsters will love and defend their country if they see it as superior to all other nations and understand that its occasional falls from grace are only short pauses or detours in the relentless flowering of freedom, capitalism, and opportunity. On the other side are those who believe that exposing young students to grim as well as glorious chapters of our past is essential to the creation of informed, responsible citizens. in this view, sugar-coated history will lead to cynicism as the young get older and recognize that their early lessons were deceptive or dishonest. Therefore, the highest commitment to patriotism is not imparting a stainless steel history but presenting the past openly and frankly, with notions about God- given superiority left to propagandists and superpatriots who purvey an "official" history.

The National History Standards aimed to help students understand the principles that the founding fathers set forth to organize national life. But was it dismal and dreary to say that the struggle to attain these lofty ideals has been painful, sometimes bloody? Is it inadmissible to suggest that the agenda set two centuries ago has not been fully accomplished? Should high school literature classes banish Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, James Farrell's Studs Lonigan, John Steinbeck's Tortilla Flats, William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom, Richard Wright's Native Son, F. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn , and Toni Morrison's Beloved because these books present a less than cheery view of American life and therefore might sap children's patriotism? Literature is about triumph and tragedy, cowardice and heroism, achievement and failure, commitment and betrayal, the light and the dark. So is history. This is one of the National History Standards' key messages.

There is, of course, plenty of hard thinking to be done about when and how to bring children face to face with what are surely grim and gloomy chapters of our past. Curriculum specialists in Germany, Japan, Russia, South Africa, and every other country face this problem. No historian or parent anywhere wants children to be sickened or unnerved by reading a history of horrors. But to learn a story of America's struggle to form "a more perfect union," a narrative involving a good deal of jostling, elbowing, and bargaining among contending groups, a story that includes political tumult, labor strife, racial conflict, and gender oppression, can fortify rather than dissipate the resolve of young people and encourage their efforts to pursue the common purpose and nourish the American creed.

The National History Standards embodied this point of view. The teachers and scholars involved did not wish to discourage children from loving their country or taking pride in its towering accomplishments. But they believed that genuine amor patriae best germinates and thrives in the context of a story regarding the continuing struggle to put constitutions, democratic institutions, entrepreneurial behavior, and Enlightenment ideals into practice. What the critics of the National History Standards refused to recognize or failed to understand was that the greatest theme in American history is not a steady, untrammeled cavalcade of progress but creative reform and ingenious reinvention, conducted generation after generation, amid much blood, sweat, and tears, to rid the country of what is grim and gloomy. Nothing can serve patriotism worse than suppressing dark chapters of our past, smoothing over clearly documentable examples of shameful behavior in public places high and low, and gliding by disgraceful violations of our national credo. It is believable that today's young students, surrounded by problems such as drugs, gun violence, and collapsing families that eat at the national fabric, will swallow the triumphal history presented to earlier generations? Sooner or later it will occur to them that a self-congratulatory version of American history makes it difficult to understand how we got to the place we occupy. Surely not all of America's problems began in the l96Os.

In times of rapid change and sharply conflicting ideologies, democracies stumble and lurch. Some regain equilibrium; others lose their way. The culture wars in recent years have tested American democracy. We have come alarmingly close to muzzling museums that dare to broach sensitive historical topics. Education reform has become thoroughly politicized, and the far right engages in a disingenuous populism by attacking the work of a much diversified profession as the scholarship of "cultural elitists" who pillage the past.

Whatever damage the tempest over the National History Standards and the cancellation of the Enola Gay exhibit have done, there is a silver lining. At all levels, history educators have recognized more clearly the goals they share and how much they need one another to protect the gains, however insufficient, that the field has made since World War II. The controversies have also aroused greater public awareness of the breadth, depth, and singular achievement of historical research and writing during the past forty years. Similarly, these arguments have brought forward talented teachers whose voices are being heard about how students will learn more history and understand it better when they are permitted to think, investigate, and interpret rather than merely memorize and recite.

Lively debate over the meaning of the past and its relation to today's affairs may signal national disunity, but this does not mean national decay. Rather, it is a sign of a vibrant democracy. It is true that when these debates become rancorous and politicized, they threaten to impede the national mission to cure ourselves of historical amnesia. National identity and national unity can never emerge if certain historical facts, events, deeds, ideas, or interpretations are declared off limits to analysis or reassessment. By the same token, no historical representation or explanation- even those dearest to the hearts of liberals, conservatives, Afrocentrists, Eurocentrists, or post-modernists-should be held publicly sacrosanct and indisputable. Any project to write the final and definitive version of our nation's or the world's history or to identify and settle on the 500, 1,000 or 10,000 historical "facts" that every American should know is best left to authoritarian states, which have always attempted to impose that kind of curriculum. Our collective memory is bound to change as the issues that matter to us as a nation change. Historical research will continue to yield new information and interpretations previously unknown. To invoke historical revisionism as a form of foul play serves democracy poorly.

"Can the scholar's history be the public's history?" asks historian Kenneth Moynihan. He believes that "professional scholars cannot enlist in a crusade to teach children to 'love America' and call that history" nor can they "devote themselves to writing a catechism for someone's version of the civic religion."⁵³ Yet Moynihan believes that the public and professional historians may be walking along converging paths. There is much evidence of this. The public, it appears, is liberating itself step by step "from the misconception that historical study is the progressive accumulation of 'facts' whose meaning is more or less self-evident." Americans are coming to understand that history is "an ongoing conversation that yields not final truths but an endless succession of discoveries that change our understanding not only of the past but of ourselves and of the times we live in."⁵⁴ This weaning from what might be called "short-pants history" has come through breathtaking new television documentaries; examples include Eyes on the Prize on the Civil Rights movement, the PBS series on World War I, and Ken Burns' series on the Civil War and on the American West. Millions of viewers have learned that history is an ongoing conversation between the scholar and the sources, between the present and the past, and between the teacher and the student. Widely attended museum exhibits, such as the Smithsonian's Farm to Factory on the black migration from the cotton South to northern cities and on the internment of Japanese Americans, impart the same message--that deep research brings forward new stories and new American experiences, that curators (like historians) make no claims to final judgments or eternal truths, and that one of democracy's most powerful weapons is the freedom to leave the reader of a history book or the viewer of a museum exhibit with as many questions as answers.

We have before us the exciting prospect of making the scholar's history the public's history. This cannot happen by erasing a generation of women's history, black history, Indian history, labor history, and a global history that gives the West its due while bringing to light the historical record of other parts of the world. Such an erasure of the plenteous scholarship of recent decades will not happen any more than one can unring the tolling bell. Nor will the scholar's history converge with the public's history if we try to reverse the democratization of what was once Clio's narrowly constructed guild. This will not happen so long as people of many backgrounds fall in love with history. History is hot because it is contested. This is not necessarily to be lamented in a democratic society.

1.    ¹Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession (New York, 1988), 75.

2.    ²Henry Steele Commager and Samuel Eliot Morison, The Growth of the American Republic (New York, 1930), 415 and 418.

3.    ³W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction: An Essay toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 (New York, 1935), 725 and 727.

4.    ⁴My Country (1948), quoted in Social Studies Review, 7 (Winter, 1991), 10.

5.    ⁵Ibid.

6.    ⁶Frank L. Owsley, John Craig Stewart, and Gordon T. Chapell, Know Alabama: An Elementary History (Northport, Ala., 1965), 176-78.

7.    ⁷Douglas Leach, Flintlock and Tomahawk: New England in King Philip's War (New York, 1966), vi.

8.    ⁸Arthur Schlesinger, New Viewpoints in American History (New York, 1924), 126. Chicago's mayor, "Big Bill" Thompson, ordered Schlesinger's New Viewpoints burned on the steps of the Chicago Public Library in 1927.

9.    ⁹Ibid.

10.    Carl Bridenbaugh, "The Great Mutation," American Historical Review, 68 (1963): 322-23, 328.

11.    Excerpt from Newt Gingrich, To Renew America (New York, 1995), in Los Angeles Times, July 31, 1995, B5.

12.    ¹²Robert Dole speech in Indianapolis, Sept. 4, 1995, transcript from Federal Document Clearing House, 5.

13.    ¹³Quoted in Marcus Cunliffe, George Washington: Man and Monument (London, 1959), 21.

14.    ¹⁴Quoted in ibid., 159.

15.    ¹⁵For Adams's descriptions and appraisals of Franklin, see Robert Middlekauff, Benjamin Franklin and His Enemies (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1996), 188-90, 197-200.

16.    ¹⁶John Adams to Benjamin Waterhouse, Oct.29, 1805 in Worthington C. Ford, ed., Statesman and Friend: Correspondence of John Adams and Benjamin Waterhouse, 1784-1822 (Boston, 1927), 31.

17.    ¹⁷Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, Feb.14, 1783, in Julian P. Boyd et al, eds., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, 6 (Princeton, 1950), 241.

18.    ¹⁸Quoted in Page Smith, John Adams, II (New York, 1962), 940.

19.    ¹⁹Nathaniel Emmons, A Discourse, Delivered on the Annual Fast in Massachusetts (Wrentham, Mass, 1801), 22.

20.    ²⁰Ruth Miller Elson, Guardians of Tradition: American Schoolbooks of the Nineteenth Century (Lincoln, Neb., 1964), 337.

21.    ²¹The phrases from attacks on Muzzey and fellow historians are examined in Harold Rugg, That Men May Understand: An American in the Long Armistice (New York, 1941), 136.

22.    ²²Charles Miller, Treason to the American Tradition: The Spirit of Benedict Arnold Reincarnated in United States History Revised in Textbooks (Los Angeles, 1922), 4.

23.    ²³Ibid.,6.

24.    ²⁴Charles Miller, The Poisoned Loving Cup: United States Histories Falsified through Pro-British Propaganda in the Sweet Name of Amity (Chicago, 1928), 165.

25.    ²⁵Ibid., v-viii.

26.    ²⁶Quoted in Michael Kammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York, 1991), 485.

27.    ²⁷Harold Rugg, That Men May Understand: An American in the Long Armistice (New York, 1941), 173.

28.    ²⁸Harold Rugg, Teacher's Guide for A History of American Civilization (Boston, 1931), 80-83.

29.    ²⁹Harold Rugg, A History of American Civilization (Boston, 1930), 198.

30.    ³⁰Rugg, That Men May Understand, 25-27.

31.    ³¹A Scottish immigrant, Forbes would soon found Forbes Magazine.

32.    ³²0. A. Armstrong, "Treason in the Textbooks," American Legion Magazine, 29 (September, 1940), 8-9, 51, 70-72.

33.    ³³Quoted in Peter E Carbonne, Jr., The Social and Educational Thought of Harold Rugg (Durham, N.C., 1977), 28.

34.    ³⁴Jack Nelson and Gene Roberts, Jr., The Censors and the Schools (Boston, 1963), 80-89.

35.    ³⁵Quoted in Nelson and Roberts, Jr., The Censors, 178.

36.    ³⁶Mark H. Leff, "Revisioning United States Political History," American Historical Review, 100 (1995), 833.

37.    ³⁷Gertrude Himmelfarb, "Some Reflections on the New History," American Historical Review, 94 (1989), 664.

38.    ³⁸Robert Fullinwider, "Patriotic History," in Fullinwider, ed., Public Education in a Multicultural Society: Policy, Theory, Critique (New York, 1995), 211.

39.    ³⁹Dole speech, Sept. 4, 1995, transcript from Federal Document Cleaming House, 5 and 6.

40.    ⁴⁰Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Man, the Reformer," in The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 12 vols. (Boston, 1903), I, 248.

41.    ⁴¹ Dole speech, op.cit., 5.

42.    ⁴²William H. Truetmer et al., The West as America (Washington, D.C., 1992), vii.

43.    ⁴³Quoted in Eric Foner and Jon Wiener, "Fighting for the West," Nation , 253 (July 29, 1991), 163.

44.    ⁴⁴ Leff, "Revisioning Political History," 844.

45.    ^45>Edward T. Linenthal, "Can Museums Achieve a Balance Between Memory and History?" Chronicle of Higher Education, Feb.10, 1995, B1.

46.    ⁴⁶New York Times, Jan. 30, 1995.

47.    ⁴⁷Paul Goldberger, "Historical Shows on Trial: Who Judges?" New York Times, Feb.11, 1996.

48.    ⁴⁸Ellsworth Brown, President of the American Association of Museums, quoted in Alfred F. Young, "S.0.S.: Storm Warning for American Museums," OAH Newsletter, 22 (1994), 6.

49.    ⁴⁹Spencer Crew, "Who Owns History? History in the Museum," unpublished paper, 3.

50.    ⁵⁰Joan Wallach Scott, "The Campaign Against Political Correctness: What's Really at Stake," Radical History Review, 54 (Fall 1992), 66.

51.    ⁵¹Newt Gingrich, To Renew America, (1995), excerpt reprinted in Los Angeles Times, July 31, 1995, B5.

52.    ⁵²Carol Gluck, "History According to Whom?" New York Times, Nov. 19, 1994.

53.    ⁵³Kenneth I. Moynihan, "Can the Scholar's History be the Public's History," Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, 105, Part 2 (1995), 308 and 309.

54.    ⁵⁴Ibid., 311.