Bulletin from the Front: Surviving the War over the National History Standards

Surely there have been few less enviable intellectual tasks in recent years than that shouldered by the professional historians, educators, and concerned citizens who sought to develop in the early 1990s national standards for the teaching and study of history in American schools. Amid a swirl of heated debate and high anxiety about the quality of American public education came a thoughtful initiative to establish the fundamentals of sound primary and secondary education in several fields of inquiry. With the support of an initially enthusiastic Lynne Cheyney, then head of the National Endowment of the Humanities, and the Department of Education, U.C.L.A.’s National Center for History in the Schools took on the challenge of establishing national standards in history. Within a short period of time, trouble ensued. As they neared publication in 1994, the standards prepared by the National Center gave rise to furious attacks from several quarters. From venues as diverse (and at times as similar) as Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, television news programs, the pages of the Wall Street Journal, and eventually the halls of Congress came a shrill chorus of criticism that called into question the motives of the standards’ architects, the merits of their educational ideals, and even the very core of modern scholarship in the discipline of history. So virulent was the opposition among some, and so contested the political debate among many, that the fight over the standards became emblematic of the modern “culture wars.” History on Trial tells the story of the battle, one of the fiercest in a long and continuing campaign to capture the moral, intellectual, and political high ground in American life and letters.

The authors are well placed to tell the story of how the standards came to be and what took place once they became the object of media attention and political scrutiny. As Directors of the National Center for History in the Schools, Charlotte Crabtree and Gary B. Nash played a major role in developing the history standards project and defending the standards themselves once they were unveiled. Indeed, they remain loyal to that purpose throughout this book. Ross Dunn, a Professor of African, Islamic, and World History at San Diego State University, served on the council of experts who helped give shape to the proposed guidelines in the ferociously contested area of world history. These three scholars were hardly alone in formulating the standards. As the authors point out, the history guidelines emerged from an extensive collaborative effort that tapped the expertise of educators, professional historians, librarians, institutions, and an array of other interested parties, including parents.

Collaboration did not ensure agreement, however—far from it. The architects of the national history standards endured stinging attacks, public ridicule, and interminable hours of exhausting and numbing debate, the latter in the hope of capturing that will o’ the wisp—consensus—so highly prized and so elusive throughout this debate. Despite their long years of experience as scholars and teachers, the architects of the national history standards clearly did not anticipate the hostility their efforts would meet. Like scholarly Rodney Dangerfields who “could get no respect” no matter how hard they tried to please their various constituencies, they met objections seemingly at every turn as they found themselves buffeted about in that most unforgiving of places—the public sphere. In this passionately told, often persuasive but ultimately cautionary tale, they make a powerful case for the responsibility professional historians bear in advancing public education in the discipline. But in so doing, they reveal the perils that come with the exercise of this duty in contemporary America.

History on Trial seeks to tell what the authors consider to be “three related stories,” each of which provides a historical context to the contemporary debate over history in the schools. They devote several chapters, first, to describing the revolution in historical knowledge and...