The New York Times Magazine 51ploy to indoctrinate children with their own hatred of America; to steal
the American birthright from the children of our country; to teach our
children to feel guilt over their own heritage.’’ It continued, ‘‘Are we
prepared to allow the haters of America to dictate how American history
will be taught to our children?’’
As soon as they were released, the country’s fi rst national guidelines for
teaching American history were torpedoed, but not by serious scholars.
By the mid-1990s, there was no longer much dispute among academ-
ic historians about the importance of social history; Black history and
Black studies had gained a foothold in the history departments of many
American universities, which themselves had changed signifi cantly — for
the fi rst time, many now included
female and African American pro-
fessors. The dispute over the stan-
dards was brought not by academ-
ics but by politicians, pundits and
lay historians.
‘‘Controversies about the teach-
ing and writing of history had
occurred at a number of times in
the past, but these had mostly taken
place within the historical profes-
sion,’’ the historian Eric Foner told
me. ‘‘But the direct politicization of
history during the standards debate
was something new. Once history
became a political football, the con-
versation was taken over by dem-
agoguery and misrepresentation.’’
Timing played a role. The contro-
versy erupted just weeks before the 1994 midterm elections. Rallying
behind Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America, Republican congressio-
nal candidates across the country were in the homestretch of a campaign
that would result in their party’s regaining control of Congress for the
fi rst time in 40 years. Attacking the standards was a way to reaffi rm
commitment to an idealized view of the past portrayed as being under
attack from ‘‘political correctness’’ and ‘‘multiculturalism.’’ This perspec-
tive is perhaps best laid out in the analysis found in the fi rst chapter of
Gingrich’s 1995 book, ‘‘To Renew America’’:
From the arrival of English-speaking colonists in 1607 until 1965, there
was one continuous civilization built around a set of commonly accepted
legal and cultural principles. From the Jamestown colony and the Pil-
grims, through Tocqueville’s ‘‘Democracy in America,’’ up to the Norman
Rockwell paintings of the 1940s and 1950s, there was a clear sense of
what it meant to be an American. Our civilization is based on a spiritual
and moral dimension. It emphasizes personal responsibility as much as
individual rights. Since 1965, however, there has been a calculated eff ort
by cultural elites to discredit this civilization.By the time his book was published, Gingrich and the other members of
his Republican Revolution had been sworn in, the fi rst session of Con-
gress since 1954 in which the G.O.P. controlled both houses. One of the
fi rst acts of the Senate was to pass a nonbinding resolution repudiating
the national history standards and affi rming that any recipient of federal
funds for developing standards ‘‘should have a decent respect for the
contributions of Western civilization, and United States history, ideas and
institutions, to the increase of freedom and prosperity around the world.’’
Much has changed in the past 25 years, as new research has transformed
and expanded the fi eld of American history yet again. Among other sub-
jects, the role of Black women in the nation’s story has increasingly been an
area of focus. It was only in the 1980s that the Library of Congress, trying
to classify Deborah Gray White’s ‘‘Ar’n’t I a Woman: Female Slaves in the
Plantation South,’’ approved a new heading in its classifi cation system for
‘‘women slaves.’’ Since then, a huge amount of scholarship has been pub-
lished about the experience of enslaved women, including pathbreaking
research like Annette Gordon-Reed’s work on the relationship between
Thomas Jeff erson and Sally Hemings, a woman who was one of the hun-
dreds of people the third president enslaved. For many generations, some
historians denied that Jeff erson had a sexual relationship with Hemings or
that she bore some of his children. Gordon-Reed’s work, along with DNA
testing published in 1998 that confi rmed Jeff erson’s paternity, established
the relationship beyond a doubt.
And yet today we fi nd ourselves back in the midst of another battle
over the teaching of American history. Though it diff ers in some respects
from the debate over the national history standards, the two episodes have
enough in common that the conclusions drawn by Nash and Crabtree
in their 1997 book, ‘‘History on Trial: Culture Wars and the Teaching of
the Past,’’ written with Ross E. Dunn, off er some insight into our present
struggles. For them, the culture war of the 1990s was clearly connected
to the upheaval in American historiography. In their view, the standards’
opponents believed that ‘‘history that dwells on unsavory or even horrifi c
episodes in our past is unpatriotic and likely to alienate young students
from their own country.’’ Their own perspective was that ‘‘exposing stu-
dents to grim chapters of our past is essential to the creation of informed,
responsible citizens.’’
This dispute about the use and potential misuse of history, it seems to
me, is what we have been arguing about for the past two years. (Indeed,
Dunn told me that about a month before his death, in July 2021, Nash
proposed an updated edition of ‘‘History on Trial’’ that would address the
wave of ‘‘divisive concepts’’ legislation.) You hear it in Trump’s warning that
the 1619 Project would ‘‘dissolve
the civic bonds that tie us togeth-
er’’; it’s there in the explanation
given by State Representative
Danny Crawford of Alabama, for
the bill he sponsored to ban the
teaching of critical race theory:
‘‘To start teaching something like
that just infl ames and throws salt
on the wound’’; and in the com-
ment by Glenn Youngkin, the
governor-elect of Virginia, to a
radio host in June that ‘‘Slavery
was abhorrent, but it doesn’t
mean that we have to actually
drive division into our schools.’’
It also appears in more schol-
arly form in a review of the his-
torian Alan Taylor’s 2016 book,
‘‘American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804,’’ by Gordon
Wood, one of the fi ve historians who wrote the letter to the editor pro-
testing the 1619 Project. The version of the revolution narrated by Taylor,
who holds the Thomas Jeff erson Foundation Chair in American History
at the University of Virginia and has twice won the Pulitzer Prize, is
raucous, complicated, unheroic and based on extremely rigorous schol-
arship. It also asserts that among the motivations of the colonists who
broke away from Britain was the protection of slavery: ‘‘In the Southern
mainland colonies, Patriots fought to preserve slavery for Blacks as well
as the liberty of whites. Indeed, they regarded slave labor as an essential
economic foundation for sustaining the freedom of white men.’’ Astute
readers will note the similarities between this line and the sentence in
Nikole’s essay that was at the center of the fi ve historians’ complaints. In
his review, Wood raises no direct objection to this interpretation, but he
concludes with concern: ‘‘The question raised by Taylor’s book is this: CanNathan Irvin HugginsAnnette Gordon-Reed