A Return to Teaching History

History was not supposed to be America’s long suit. The Founding Fathers prided themselves on the historically unprecedented nature and radicalism of their revolution. And in the century that followed, our greatest national poet, Walt Whitman, celebrated pioneers who cheerfully sing

History has grown even less central to our imaginations in the 21st century, as the focus of American education has, over the past 150 years, shifted away from the formation of citizens to the training of employees. In elementary and secondary education, history has been increasingly squeezed out by demands for more math, science, and language arts teaching. Partly this is the by-product of good intentions and unintended consequences. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 was supposed to provide federal heft for improving primary- and secondary-school learning; what it produced, however, was a drop in the instructional time spent on history, music, and civics in more than 70 percent of the nation’s 15,000 school districts, in favor of a frenzied focus on boosting math and reading scores. By 2014, the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that only 18 percent of American middle schoolers could be considered “proficient” in American history; by 2022, it had sunk to 13 percent. Several years ago, I quizzed one of my classes at Gettysburg College about their high school history textbooks. Half of them hadn’t had one. The other half — literally half — had been issued Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, which reduces that history to a series of simple binaries of “slaveowner against slave, landlord against tenant, corporation against worker, rich against poor.”

No wonder, then, that from 2011 to 2017, the number of history majors in American colleges and universities has declined by a staggering 33 percent. According to Benjamin Schmidt, who analyzed this decline for the American Historical Association in 2018, “Students and their parents seem to be thinking a lot more that they need to major in something practical,” and “history, humanities, English, and philosophy are not those practical majors.” And they are not entirely wrong. The number of college and university history-teaching positions advertised on the academic job site H-Net collapsed from a high of 742 in 2007 to just 285 in 2023, with only 61 of those positions being open to new-career historians of the United States. Nor is the future of history likely to improve. Today’s undergraduates have lived all their educational lives on keyboards and screens, and I have had to deal with more and more students whom I cannot send to the archives to do research because, quite simply, they cannot read cursive.

There is a price to be paid for this. History is the meta-narrative; everything in human experience and knowledge has a history, and without knowledge of that history, we are condemned to a constant recovery from the starting line, as though we were Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. The impulse to wonder about the past and cast it into a narrative is as old and deep as the cave paintings of Lascaux and as recent as last night’s documentary. And history presides over more even than narrative: whether it’s Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire paintings, Shakespeare’s plays, or Verdi’s Aida, history has been the informer of all the other arts.

But looming up behind all of these in importance is the sense of identity that history imparts to individuals and societies. The historical declaration “My father was a wandering Aramean” was the first statement of Jewish identity (in Deuteronomy 26:5), and it is no accident that these words appear in the central portion of the Passover Haggadah, a text designed to shape identity through the recitation of historical narrative. The experience of the past forms our present; who we were shapes who we are. Saint Paul tried the same narrative technique, exhorting the first generation of Christians to connect their history to that of the Jews:

And so Cicero regarding the Roman republic: “To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child,” scoffed the great lawyer. “For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?”

If you want to measure how much is lost by the neglect of history, whether in teaching or writing, ask those who have suffered under persecution. For Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the erasure of history is the first strategy of tyrants, who know that wiping out the past gives the oppressed no means of comparison to a better time or place, no ground on which to resist in the present. “A people which no longer remembers has lost its history and its soul,” Solzhenitsyn said in 1976. “To fight for our memory, for our memory of what things were like — that is the task of the artist.” That fight was the task to which Solzhenitsyn applied himself in The Gulag Archipelago, and it is worth noticing that 15 years later, the Soviet tyranny collapsed.

The dictators understand this, and they tremble. Much as every despot has come to power promising better future worlds of various sorts, the totalitarians really look first to control and manipulate history. The great Czech novelist Milan Kundera saw this in the Eastern European Soviet bloc. “They shout that they want to shape a better future, but it’s not true,” Kundera objected. The autocrats “want to be masters of the future only for the power to change the past.” This is why “the first step in liquidating a people . . . is to erase its memory,” Kundera (like Solzhenitsyn) insisted. “Destroy its books, its culture, its history, then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.”

So why, then, do we run so carelessly the risks of ignoring history? First, we should say the obvious: Taking care of the past, as the task of historians, is not easy. There is, after all, so much of it, and no single person can hope to be master of more than comparatively small slivers. Even within those slivers, the work of archival research and the parsing out of patterns require a persistence and a wisdom that are sufficient to exhaust a lifetime. No one who aspires to do the work of history should embark on it with anything less than the wildest and most preoccupied form of love, or with what one of my old teachers, Theophilus John Herter, called sitzfleisch, by which he meant the capacity to sit for interminable lengths of time in archives and libraries, turning over one page after another.

Second, and almost as obvious, are the contradictory returns one is likely to gain from the evidence. The moment one rises above the simplest historical statements — as in, “The United States entered World War I during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson” — tension and debate begin to animate the presentation. Still more contradiction is liable to emerge as new and unanticipated sources of information surface, not unlike the discovery provided in November 1998, by DNA testing, that Thomas Jefferson had probably fathered at least one (and probably all) of the six children borne by Sally Hemings, or the revelations from the old Soviet archives indicating that embarrassingly well-placed Americans in the 1950s had spied for the Soviets.

But there are some particular difficulties in the path of writing and teaching American history. The first of these has already been alluded to: that the American Republic is (as the Great Seal of the United States proclaims) a novus ordo seclorum, a new order of the ages and consequently was meant to be a fresh start for human history that renders all pasts irrelevant to Americans. This futurism may be what the French Revolution and many subsequent revolutions since then have believed about themselves and what that talented propagandist for the American Revolution, Thomas Paine, believed when he wrote in 1776 that we Americans “have it in our power to begin the world over again.” But the architects of the American Revolution did not propose doing away with all pasts. They wanted to be rid of the world of false hierarchies that had grown up for centuries around the necks of European nations, in the same way that Galileo and Newton had rid Europe’s intellectual world of the false hierarchies of Aristotelian physics in favor of the natural physics of astronomy and gravity. But their experiment was novus because, like Galileo’s and Newton’s, it dared to “recur to the first principles” of governance, which is why the American revolutionaries industriously dusted off Polybius, Plutarch, Thucydides, Vergil, Cicero, and Xenophon as though passing an exam in classics. And Thomas Jefferson, observed the revolutionary leader James Duane, was “the greatest rubber off of dust” that he had met with.

Nor was the generation of the American Founders shy about requiring the teaching of the Revolution’s history to succeeding generations. It was critical to them that the earliest school textbooks be filled with a “number of stories, mostly taken from the history of America, and adorned with … a short and easy explanation of the Constitution of the United States” in which “the great principles of liberty, and of the federal government, are laid down and explained.” Seventy years later, the Swiss traveler Georges Fisch was impressed by how “the schools of the North are centres of the most intense patriotism. Children are taught songs that excite their young heads and fire their young hearts.”

But there is another difficulty in cultivating a permanent respect for history in American minds, and that is the weakness our imagination has for conspiracy theories. The American Revolution was an experiment in government from the bottom up, without hierarchies and aristocrats, and this has fostered the sense in American minds that we are an exceptional people. This is not entirely unfounded: “We have as a people no past and very little present, but a boundless and glorious future,” said Frederick Douglass, himself once a slave, but who devoutly believed that American mobility and self-transformation were without a copy anywhere else in the world. But there is a difference between being exceptional within history and imagining that we are an exception from history and can make it up from whatever point seems convenient. The Confederacy, for instance, invented a history around race and soil, but it was really little more than an accusation that one-half of the American nation had conspired against it. The Confederates were, if anything, obsessed with conspiracy, since they imagined a slave insurrection around every corner and tried to erase that terror by confecting the fairy tale of the happy and contented slave.

But in their conspiracy concoction, the Confederates were, in a strange way, taking part in an American pastime. There was more than a little whiff of conspiracy in Jefferson’s Declaration, where (once we move past the majestic two-paragraph opening of political philosophy) Britain’s imperial tax gatherers are depicted as running a conspiracy against the colonies’ customary liberties:

Of its 1,331 words, no fewer than 706 constitute an accusatory history of grievance, perhaps the most successful such text in the history of the world. It was through narrating its history on its own terms that America created itself, and once in place, the conspiracy-hunting habit became endemic in American imaginations. Mercy Otis Warren’s 1805 history of the Revolution accused the Federalists of “a conspiracy” to re-plant “hereditary distinctions and noble orders” in America, and ever since, Americans have been uncovering conspiratorial explanations of American and human life, from Ford’s Theatre and Dealey Plaza all the way to The Matrix.

The appeal of conspiracy theories in America has some important roots in our break with the aristocratic past. For all their indignities, aristocracies often serve as a bridge to the past and a reminder that the past contains few real novelties, much less mysteries. In America, absent such a check, any answer to the questions of the past becomes as good as another, whether rational or merely impulsive. Conspiracy theories offer their adherents the thrill of a special knowledge of how things came to be, a secret gnosis that none but initiates enjoy and that explains everything (a sure sign that, like a plastic decoder ring, it explains nothing). Conspiracy masquerades as explanation, whether of the past or present; its ambition is to replace history. Even when it purports to deal with history, it substitutes for the complexity of history the all-or-nothing “Eureka!” of sensational plot construction. Narrative becomes melodrama, suspicion, accusation, indictment.

Unlike some conspiracy theories, antisemitism refuses to take the form of a harmless eccentricity. After all, the intensity with which a handful have insisted that John Wilkes Booth was the agent of a conspiracy led by Edwin M. Stanton to murder Lincoln and that he escaped capture to live out a life incognito in Oklahoma (or Texas, take your pick) has not noticeably affected American foreign policy or the price of eggs. Antisemitism is another matter, and its resurgence of late in the United States should not be mischaracterized, as Pamela Nadell’s Antisemitism: An American Tradition makes clear, as having emerged ex nihilo. “Colonists not only carried rucksacks to America. They carried ideas about Jewish enmity and degeneracy that dwell at the core of Western civilization,” she writes. “The first Jews to land in New Amsterdam in 1654 faced them head on.” Three and a half centuries later, it springs up again like some noxious, self-multiplying weed. On the political Right, the so-called Christian nationalists wish to believe that the United States was founded by self-conscious Christians to be a self-consciously Christian republic, only to have that identity spirited away by piratical secularists, globalists, and you-know-who.

But the political Left has had its own share of conspiracy theories over the years, making money madness, class madness, race madness, and other madnesses — often with a Star of David woven into the infographic or cartoon — the sole and secret drivers of American history. Christian nationalists would have us adopt domestic policies that would make one religion the standard of civic virtue, while the Left would make the same demand for some favorite quasi-religion as well. No one, and least of all myself, has any wish to dismiss the importance of religion or money or class or race in American life. (That would require yet another conspiracy theory). But 250 years and a population of 300-plus million people do not resolve themselves into such quick reductive formulas, or along such simple and uncomplicated lines. The conspiracy-mongers lack, in other words, sitzfleisch.

Good history, with all its complexity and self-contradiction, all its many voices and desires, inoculates us against conspiracy theories; it invites reason to mount the bench of judgement and holds off panic and fear that some kind of heretofore unsuspected catastrophe is about to be visited on us. It is an intellectual guardrail against rage and vindictiveness; it inculcates humility in the face of both human accomplishment and human depravity. Good history doesn’t sing a single song, and it doesn’t claim to have discerned a “right side” that others must be blind or wicked for not seeing.

As Americans move into the Semiquincentennial of their independent republic, it might be worth taking the advice of an English contemporary of the Revolution, Samuel Johnson, who, in his 1759 philosophical novel Rasselas, wrote: “There is no part of history so generally useful as that which relates the progress of the human mind, the gradual improvement of reason, the successive advances of science . . . and the revolutions of the intellectual world.”

This is worth listening to because we do a great wrong to the victims of oppression and theft — and who among us is silly enough to pretend that there are no such victims in the American story? — by producing for this 250th anniversary the kind of “nationalist” soap operas in which all the brothers have been valiant and all the sisters virtuous. Americans should confess the shortcomings of our history as full parts of our identity, and for good and ill. The irony of much of our “new” history, which purports to discover unseen webs of oppression and exploitation, is that it simplistically ignores how we have always known about those webs, always exposed them, always struggled to tear them down. It was not yesterday but 1842 when Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, much like Frederick Douglass, warned

At the same time, while you cannot tell fictions of purity and expect them to carry the weight of historical fact, you also cannot tell fictions of unrelenting gloom without delivering a demoralized people into the hands of the world’s tormentors. No one has loved stories of American failure more than those who feared what American success might do to their demented dreams of power.

Alongside the ups and downs, and mixed into both the surprising equalities and the depressing inequalities, Americans should entertain a particular curiosity for America’s ideas and for its extraordinary but simple improvements in the day-to-day living conditions of its people. As a fit subject for Semiquincentennial inquiry, begin with the “intellectual world” that Johnson spoke of. Josiah Royce, America’s most needlessly neglected philosopher, insisted that in America, “wherever you go, you find the typical American sensitive to ideas, curious about doctrines . . . disposed to plan great things for his country and for his community, proud of both, jealous of their honor, and discontented with the life that now is.” It is about time we took that estimate seriously and flung away the Whitmanesque notion that Americans are only interested in the bottom line.

Move then to the “improvement” that Johnson thought so vital to a “useful” history. In this 250th year of our being, it might be worth glancing through Robert Gordon’s epic The Rise and Fall of American Growth (2016) or Robert William Fogel’s The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700–2100 (2004) to marvel that in little more than a single generation, Americans leapt from a still-medieval reliance on candles and muscle power to the telegraph, the steamboat, and the railroad; that not a single American home was wired for electricity in 1880, but 100 percent of them were by 1940; that 37 percent of American deaths in 1900 were due to infectious diseases, but only 5 percent by 1955; that all the hard-surface roads in America in 1900 would have stretched only from New York City to Boston. In the long run of human affairs, these are accomplishments that almost beggar description.

Even the short end of the American stick is a position that other nations and societies over the centuries could have beheld only with envy. This is a history worth telling at the Semiquincentennial, and especially telling to each other — a history built around great ideas and great improvements but that has been served by frail human beings who have not always loved greatness as they should but who at least embody that greatness. In the words of Auden,

In the deserts of the heart

Let the healing fountain start,

In the prison of his days

Teach the free man how to praise.