Healing at the Razor's Edge: Reflections on a History of Multicultural America

Abstract

Toward close of Clio, Canons, and Culture, Lawrence W. Levine's insightful and provocative 1993 presidential address to Organization of American Historians, we were again reminded that the United States has always been a multicultural, multiethnic, multiracial society, but in our own time these truths -and their implications for higher education -have become increasingly difficult to ignore. Concerning those educational implications, Levine said, As university becomes more open to and representative of diverse peoples, experiences, traditions, and cultures that compose America, it has to enable its students to comprehend nature of society to which they belong, of groups and traditions they will interact with, meaning of ideas and experiences they will inevitably encounter.' While developing his cogent argument and continuing ongoing debate about future of our past, Levine recalled relentless quest for a new narrative of our nation's that was magnificent obsession of our late colleague, Nathan Irvin Huggins, a quest cut short by his untimely death in 1989. Like many others, Huggins was concerned about our profession's continuing tendency to promulgate a holy history that told of inevitable and progressive rise of a white-dominated, fundamentally righteous, and all-conquering nation. He was especially troubled that this establishment had failed to face destructive and distorting power of slavery and racism at heart of nation's life. But Huggins also called attention to all poor, powerless and inarticulate Americans who had been marginalized or excluded by old master narrative, a that consistently failed to capture painfully rich and diverse truth of American experience.2