As I have noted elsewhere, Americans like to fight about history. In these fights, Americans often prefer to not let facts get in the way of a good argument. Welcome to the history wars.
Battles over the uses and abuses of history are nothing new. Americans have fought over the meaning of history in our public life and our schools since the founding of the Republic. The camps in this conflict tend to have one of two ideas regarding the teaching of American history. Camp One: the rising generation needs to learn history to inculcate patriotism, morality, and civics. Camp Two: the rising generation needs to study history as discipline to foster critical thinking, which in turn will make them better informed citizens. Finding a consensus for defining civics and patriotism proved elusive, especially when tensions around any number of contemporary social anxieties and controversies are in the mix.
For generations these conflicts have often focused on textbooks. Textbooks have a big footprint in the history education landscape. Teachers used them to structure classes - chapters organized classes and provided the material to be covered in tests. Indeed, for some early educational reformers textbooks served to standardize curriculum and content in a highly decentralized and uneven educational system. The importance of textbooks meant that authors and publishers felt pressure to create an historical narrative that proved the least offensive to the greatest number of districts and state selection boards.
Over the years textbooks have been accused of being simplified, partisan, ideological, subversive, and boring. There is a rich body of literature of academics and intellectuals denouncing the state of textbooks intended for k-12 history classrooms. Many agreed that history textbooks suffered from mind-numbing blandness. Frances FitzGerald, in America Revised: What History Textbooks have Taught our Children about Their Country and How and Why those Textbooks have Changed in Different Decades (1979), concludes with a particularly damning statement on history education: “To teach history with the assumption that students have the psychology of laboratory pigeons is not only to close off the avenues for thinking about the future; it is deprive American children of their birthright.” (218) Those on the left accused textbook authors of failing to address the darker side of U.S. history. James Loewen, in his popular Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (1995) denounced a series of popular American history textbooks as mythologizing past figures and papering over racism. Those on the right accused textbook authors of spreading subversive thoughts and undermining the patriotism of America’s youth.
Social Studies
None of these concerns were new. Following World War I a group of educational reformers sought to replace history with social studies as the preferred way to prepare students for citizenship and life. Harold Rugg was a key architect of this movement, writing curriculum and textbooks that formed the foundation of social studies. Rugg played a central role in attempting to modernize the curriculum for the industrial age.
Rugg deserves greater treatment elsewhere, but in short Rugg believed that history education was stodgy and overly reliant on memorization of facts and dates in a way students would not find useful in an industrial democracy. Rugg and advocates of social studies were influenced by John Dewey, and thus very much fell within the progressive tradition of educational reform. Rugg and Dewey believed that education could be used to promote social reform, which was critical for a democratic citizenry.
Rugg argued that the history taught in many classrooms tended more towards myth with simplified stories that ill-served students who would enter a highly complex and technical society in which rapid change had become the norm. Thus the social studies curriculum that Rugg and others wrote emphasized the need to incorporate the new social sciences that had emerged at the end of the 19th century. In addition to history, students would now learn social sciences such as economics and political science.
The American educational system has always been highly decentralized. Indeed, one of the outcomes of Rugg’s work was that social studies curricula became more uniform during the period when his textbooks and curriculum proved to be highly popular.
Rugg’s critique of history had some validity in that history as memorization and myth no doubt existed but during this same time history as an academic discipline changed. Just as we saw the emergence and professionalization of the social sciences as disciplines, history underwent the same process. History departments in colleges and universities became populated with professors trained in graduate schools modeled on the German system that emphasized historiography and archival research. An examination of the historical debates of this period featured historians arguing over many of the same issues Rugg raised.
Rugg’s textbooks and curriculum fell out of favor in the 1940s. His left-leaning politics that fit the national mood during the Great Depression fell out of favor in the late 1940s; ironically his work fell in one of the battles of the history wars. During the 1950s and early 1960s most text-book publishers reached a bland consensus that seemed to please many by leaving out a great deal. However, Americans had something of a national narrative.
Losing the Narrative
That narrative did not survive the rights revolutions and the political upheavals of the 1960s. The Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Movement in particular challenged the popular historical narratives. Publishers scrambled to include groups and events that had previously been ignored or glossed over. Historians wrote a lot about the fragmenting of America, the loss of a national narrative.
Gary Nash and Charlotte Crabtree, funded by the George W. Bush Administration, created the National Standards for United States History (1994). Much like Rugg, Nash and Crabtree wanted a common experience across the nation that met the needs of contemporary education that also offered a complex picture of American history. However, the standards did not survive the Culture Wars.
More recently, Jill Lepore in These Truths: A History of the United States (2018) attempted to weave together a narrative to help a nation torn apart by culture wars. In it, she addressed long-standing issues in the relationship of textbooks, history, and civics.
“In deciding what to leave in and what to leave out, I’ve confined myself to what, in my view, a people constituted as a nation in the early twenty-first century need to know about their own past, mainly because this book is meant to double as an old-fashioned civics book, an explanation of the origins and ends of democratic institutions, from the town meetings to the party system, from the nomination convention to the secret ballot, from talk radio to Internet polls.”
“Aside from being a brief history of the United States and a civics primer, this book aims to be something else too: It’s an explanation of the nature of the past. History isn’t only a subject; it’s also a method.” (xvii - xix)
Lepore’s These Truths is in some ways a through-back. A narrative history focusing on politics and the nation state. Reviewing it in the New York Times, Andrew Sullivan opens with “It isn’t until you start reading it that you realize how much we need a book like this one at this particular moment.”
This moment, however, might be the issue. As Lepore well knows, we live in a new and shifting digital age. The American Historical Association recently competed Mapping the Landscape of Secondary US History Education | AHA. Among the findings, high school social studies and history teachers are often careful not to be overly partisan, and they are increasingly not relying on textbooks in favor of digital resources. The internet is our new textbook, which presents challenges in creating the historical narrative that we have been seeking and critiquing.
Resources:
Peter F. Carbone, Jr., The Social and Educational Thought of Harold Rugg (1977)
Frances FitzGerald, America Revised: What history textbooks have taught our children about their country and how and why those textbooks have changed in different decades (1979)
Herbert M. Kleibard, The Struggle for the American Curriculum: 1893 - 1958 (3rd edition, 2004)
James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (1995)
Joseph Moreau, School Book Nation: Conflicts over American History Textbooks from the Civil War to the Present (2004).
Gary B. Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross E. Dunn, History on Trial: The Culture Wars and the Teaching of the Past (1997)
Donald Yacovone, Teaching White Supremacy: America’s Democratic Ordeal and the Forging of Our National Idenity (2022)
Jonathan Zimmerman, Whose America?: Culture Wars in the Public Schools (2002).
The Great Textbook War : Throughline : NPR
History Here and Now: The Issue of Presentism and Relevance – Jandoli Institute Phillip Payne and Brian Moritz
Mapping the Landscape of Secondary US History Education | AHA
The American Past: A History of Contradictions - The New York Times