FROM THE PUBLISHER WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION
"A deeply informed, balanced, and compelling book." -Los Angeles Times
In History on Trial, authors Gary B. Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross E. Dunn examine the controversy and criticism over how our nation's history should be taught, culminating in the debate about National History Standards. The book chronicles a media war spearheaded by conservatives from National Endowment for the Humanities veteran Lynne Cheney to Rush Limbaugh, posing questions with regard to history as it relates to national identity. What, the authors ask, is our objective in teaching history to children? Is the role of schools, textbooks, and museums to instill patriotism? Do we revise and reinterpret the past to tell stories that reflect present-day values? If so, who should articulate these values? Wonderfully clear, timely in its intentions, History on Trial provides a thoughtful account of the ways in which Americans have, since the beginning of the Republic, perceived and argued about our past.
FROM THE CRITICS Publishers Weekly Why is America seemingly bedeviled by competing versions of history? What is history, and how should it be taught? These contentious questions are at the center of History on Trial. After an overview of how the teaching of American history has evolved, the authors recount the development of the National History Standards, a three-year project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and chaired by Nash, professor of history at UCLA. In October 1994, just as the standards were to be published, NEH chair Lynne Cheney wrote a scathingly critical op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal charging that, far from improving history education, the standards distorted history. The attack was soon taken up by other critics and eventually carried to Congress. Here, the authors present a spirited defense of a broad, inclusionary view, and their discussion of traditionalists' emphasis on facts versus a modern approach stressing empathy is especially illuminating. However, they undercut their argument, and their claim to dispassionate objectivity, with ad hominem attacks on traditionalists; "conservative" or "right wing" are frequently used as though they were sufficient to settle the argument. Moreover, the account teeters between broad generalization and the minutiae of committees, organizations and agencies. Regardless of one's own views, the final impression is of a great deal of energy expended not on education, historical research, or even cultural debate, but wasted on political turf wars. If there's a hopeful sign, it may be the observation that "authoritarian states don't have history wars, but democracies frequently do."