Begun in 1989 as a bi-partisan initiative to enhance the teaching of K-12 history to America's students, the authors of this book--Gary B. Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross E. Dunn--along with many others, prepared a set of guidelines and teaching examples that would guide instructors in the preparation of their classes. "History on Trial" is largely about the effort to prepare the guidelines and the furor that they caused in the mid-1990s, although there is a discussion in the early part of the book about the "culture wars" in general in the latter twentieth century.
Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and aided by the Department of Education, the effort to develop these National Standards at UCLA's National Center for History in the Schools derailed in 1994 because of a conservative attack that characterized the effort as "hijacked" by political correctness and the agenda of the American Left. Led by Lynne Cheney, former head of the NEH, and aided by conservative commentators ranging from Rush Limbaugh to William Bennett to Charles Krauthammer, conservatives criticized the work of a large community of historians and teachers who developed these voluntary standards. They questioned the effort to challenge students to consider new ways of seeing the past, they criticized the reexamination of traditional interpretations, they abhorred a more multicultural and questioning approach to delving into history. It was during this era that "revisionist history" first entered the lexicon as a term of derision, as if understanding of the past could never be altered in any way.
The opening salvo of this debate began in October 1994 in the pages of the "Wall Street Journal" when Lynne Cheney ambushed Nash and the others involved in the writing of the history standards. She questioned mostly, as did other critics, the teaching examples packaged with the standards. The standards themselves were relatively non-controversial and quite rigorous statements of what students should know at a given point in their education. Representative of the right's criticisms, Krauthammer wrote, "The whole document strains to promote the achievements and highlight the victimization of the country's preferred minorities, while straining equally to degrade the achievements and highlight the flaws of the white males who ran the country for its first two centuries" (pp. 189-90). As evidence, the critics mined the teaching examples for relative mentions of people and events (Speckled Snake, a Cherokee warrior, or Mercy Otis Warren, or any number of other non-traditional figures in American history texts), for challenges to students to reconsider traditional understandings (for example, questions about the relative place of Columbus in American history, as a vanguard of progress or conquest), as a statement of misplaced emphasis (shifting more toward world history rather than stressing Western Civilization).
For more than a year the onslaught continued, with Nash, et al., answering the challenges. This book details the debate, offers rebuttals by the advocates of the standards, admits some errors both in substance and in strategy to answering the critics, and discusses the revisions of the standards that eventually led to the jettisoning of the teaching examples and other changes. Most important, and this has been repeated many times in the culture wars, the facts of the controversy got lost in the media blasts. Never mind that many of the criticisms were groundless, few people actually read the standards. Even Congress got into the act, passing a resolution condemning the standards even though they were completely voluntary and not a part of any official educational requirement.
What I found most interesting about "History on Trial" was the fierceness of the debate. Nash, et al., suggested, and I agree, that this was the case because of the need to redefine national identity and a concern that the bulwarks of traditional conceptions may be crumbling. This has recast historical inquiry as an intellectual battleground where the casualties are no longer theories about the past that matter mostly to historians but the overall "weltanschauung" of society in a post-modern, multicultural, anti-hierarchical age. The fundamental philosophical thrust of modern society has been a blurring of the line between fact and fiction, between realism and poetry, between the unrecoverable past and our memory of it. This raising of the inexact character of historical "truth," as well as its relationship to myth and memory and the reality of the dim and unrecoverable past, has foreshadowed deep fissures in the landscape of identity and what it means to be American. Truth, it seems, has differed from time to time and place to place with reckless abandon and enormous variety. Choice between them is present everywhere both in the past and the present; my truth dissolves into your myth and your truth into my myth almost as soon as it is articulated. We see this reinforced everywhere about us today, and mostly we shake our heads and misunderstand the versions of truth espoused by various groups about themselves and about those excluded from their fellowship.
The desperation of competing claims on the past are played out very publicly, and not without rancor, in such large-scale settings as the debate over the national history standards. "History on Trial" is a very fine discussion of this debate, of course written from the perspective of the authors of the standards. I have read the standards in their various versions over the years, and I believe they are remarkably comprehensive and valuable, so I have my own positive perspective on this matter beyond reading "History on Trial." I would very much like to read a history of the debate written by Lynne Cheney or other critics of the standards. It would add to the offerings in the marketplace of ideas, a marketplace that I still believe has an important role in modern America despite those who would seek to limit its discourse.
