The National History Standards and the Culture Wars of Our Times

Abstract

Let me begin with a story. Several years ago, at the peak of the Bicentennial hoopla, I went to Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, Oklahoma, as visiting faculty for a week during one of many summer institutes the NEH used to sponsor. In attendance were three dozen smart, precollegiate teachers of history; among my responsibilities was a keynote address?very like this one, I suppose, except that the audience was huge (students, university and precollegiate faculty, nonacademics) and the event staged in a pit-like auditorium. I was supposed to speak for about an hour at a podium that was about a foot too tall for me, under a spotlight. I had been asked to talk about how the framing generation had conceptualized the republic, liberty, and authority. To this day, I think it was one of the best speeches I have ever given. I began in the usual, framer-and-founder way, but then began talking about the idea of regenerative revolution: republics that stopped taking stock of themselves, stopped pressing at the edges of civic possibility, became jealous of liberty, and failed to scrutinize the body politic constantly for evidences of tyranny, would simply lose their way. Or so James Madison thought. So did Thomas Jefferson. And (somewhat later) so did Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass, William DuBois, Eugene Debs, Martin Luther King Jr., and other carriers of the idea of civic regeneration. I probably got a bit carried away. I said, for example, that the angry mobs gathered at town squares throughout the eastern seaboard to protest the secrecy of the Philadelphia convention may have got the republican idea exactly right. The enemy, after all, was tyranny and