50 11.14.21
acknowledges oppression, exploitation and racism. For generations, Holly-
wood movies, museum exhibits and, most of all, standard K-12 social-studies
school curriculums had told a relatively simple, mostly stable and basically
uplifting story about the American past. Two decades or so downstream from
the political and historical paradigm shift of the 1960s, that began to change.
One driver of this change, curiously enough, was a conservative-led nation-
al anxiety about the competitiveness of the American work force in a global-
ized world. This gnawing fear was crystallized in breathless reports like 1983’s
‘‘A Nation at Risk,’’ commissioned by President Ronald Reagan’s Department
of Education, which declared that ‘‘the educational foundations of our soci-
ety are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens
our very future.’’ This led to an unprecedented federal eff ort to raise the
standard of instruction in public schools. In 1991, the administration of Pres-
ident George H. W. Bush announced
an ambitious plan ‘‘to move every
community in America toward the
national education goals.’’ A corner-
stone of this plan was the creation of
voluntary educational guidelines in
all the main subject areas that would
bring the most up-to-date scholarly
perspectives and pedagogical practic-
es into the pre-collegiate classroom.
The National Endowment for the
Humanities, then under the direction
of Lynne Cheney, was responsible
for helping to initiate the standards
in history. Several years earlier, the
N.E.H. created the National Center
for History in Schools, an organiza-
tion intended, in Cheney’s words, to
‘‘reinvigorate the study of history at all
levels of elementary and secondary education.’’ The N.C.H.S. was located at
U.C.L.A. and directed by Charlotte Crabtree, a scholar of education. Now
Crabtree and Gary B. Nash, a historian of early America, were tapped to
direct the country’s fi rst-ever national standards for what schoolchildren
should be taught about the American past.
This was a daunting challenge. To begin with, the paradigm shift of the
1960s resulted in a vast increase in the number of new histories. ‘‘Historical
inquiries are ramifying in a hundred directions at once, and there is no coor-
dination among them,’’ Bernard Bailyn, one of the nation’s most esteemed
historians, wrote a few years earlier. The sheer volume of new history frac-
tured what had been a simple story and fostered a sense of anxiety that the
days of a single master narrative were over. Among academics, this collapse
of ‘‘synthesis’’ was fretted over throughout the 1980s. And yet, as the scholar
Nell Irvin Painter pointed out at the time, ‘‘The new histories expose the sad
fact that the purported syntheses of the 1950s... claimed to encompass all
the American people but spoke only of a small segment.’’
In this environment, channeling new research into national educational
standards required delicate, methodical work. Over the next two and a half
years, the N.C.H.S. undertook what its assistant director at the time, Linda
Symcox, described as ‘‘a vast collaboration among public schoolteachers,
state social-studies specialists, school superintendents, university historians
and a broad range of professional and scholarly organizations, public interest
groups, parents’ and teachers’ organizations and individual citizens nation-
wide.’’ As Nash described it later, ‘‘At no time in the previous century had
so many diff erent history educators from so many diff erent sectors of the
world of education worked collaboratively on a project of this magnitude.’’
There were three separate volumes of the standards, one for U.S. history,
one for world history and one for grades K through 4. The U.S. history stan-
dards were divided into 10 chronological eras, beginning with ‘‘Era 1: Three
Worlds Meet,’’ in which students would learn ‘‘the characteristics of societies
in the Americas, Western Europe and West Africa that increasingly interacted
after 1450.’’ In ‘‘Era 2: Colonization and Settlement,’’ they would understand,
among other things, ‘‘how the values and institutions of European economic
life took root in the colonies’’ and ‘‘how slavery reshaped European and Afri-
can life in the Americas.’’ And in ‘‘Era 3: Revolution and the New Nation,’’ they
would come to see how ‘‘the American Revolution involved multiple move-
ments among the new nation’s many groups to reform American society.’’
In a sense, this was precisely what President Bush and Lynne Cheney
had ordered up: a fresh set of educational guidelines that refl ected the most
up-to-date research. The problem, as Symcox shrewdly notes in her 2002
book, ‘‘Whose History? The Struggle for National Standards in American
Classrooms,’’ was that ‘‘the standards were the product of recent historical
scholarship that challenged traditional conceptions of the nation’s histo-
ry.’’ The most up-to-date research had increasingly come to focus on the
‘‘formerly excluded,’’ whose ‘‘anonymous lives,’’ once recovered, ‘‘could not
easily be incorporated into the traditional patriotic narrative of a shared
and glorious past whose onward march had been determined solely by the
actions of great leaders and generals.’’
In October 1994, about a week before the standards were scheduled to be
released to the public, Cheney — who had by then resigned from her position
as head of the N.E.H. — published a column in The Wall Street Journal titled
‘‘The End of History.’’ Though she had helped start the process that led to the
standards, she now professed to being appalled at how they had turned out,
describing them in an interview as ‘‘grim and gloomy’’ and calling on readers
to fi ght their certifi cation. Many of her criticisms relied on misrepresenta-
tions, like the claim that the standards barely mentioned the Constitution
(which was in fact mentioned often in the chapters explaining the relevant
standards and in the sample activities for teachers); others evinced skepti-
cism toward the increased inclusivity that marked the previous decades’
scholarship, such as her complaint that Harriet Tubman was mentioned
more times than Ulysses S. Grant. Standing in the way of this agenda would
be a challenge, she warned, because ‘‘those wishing to do so will have to go
up against an academic establishment that revels in the kind of politicized
history that characterizes much
of the national standards. But the
battle is worth taking on. We are
a better people than the national
standards indicate, and our chil-
dren deserve to know it.’’
Cheney’s column stunned
Crabtree, with whom she had
worked closely for years. (Ross
E. Dunn, a professor emeritus of
history at San Diego State Uni-
versity and associate director of
the N.C.H.S., told me that this
ended their relationship.) Rush
Limbaugh followed Cheney’s
lead, weighing in just days after
her column to lambaste the
standards as a ‘‘bastardization of
American history’’ and complain-
ing that the United States ‘‘does not deserve the reputation it’s getting in
multicultural classrooms.’’ A headline in The Times noted that the ‘‘Plan to
Teach U.S. History Is Said to Slight White Males.’’ Charles Krauthammer’s
Washington Post column ‘‘History Hijacked’’ inveighed against the standards
for trying ‘‘to promote the achievements and highlight the victimization of
the country’s preferred minorities, while straining equally to degrade the
achievements and highlight the fl aws of the white males who ran the country
for its fi rst two centuries.’’
Though Cheney had distorted the standards, she had eff ectively ‘‘dic-
tated the script that others would follow,’’ as Symcox put it. A letter to
the editor in response to her column commended Cheney for revealing
that the work of Nash and the others was ‘‘nothing more than a cynical From left: Scurlock Studio Records, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution; Ann Johansson; Tony Rinaldo; via Harvard University Archives.Carter G. Woodson
Gary Nash