TH FUTUR AMERICAN HISTO DEBATES OVER THE
best ways to teach American history—what to teach, what to emphasize, how to communicate it—grew even more pronounced after a year of a pandemic, focus on racial justice, and the final year of the Trump administration. We assembled an expert panel to discuss the issues at hand, particularly for K–12 students. From the January 6, 2021, online program “The Future of American History Education: What Now?” JANE KAMENSKY, Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History at Harvard University IAN ROWE, Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute MICHELLE HERCZOG, History-Social Science, Coordinator III for the Los Angeles County Office of Education YONI APPELBAUM, Senior Editor of The Atlantic—Moderator
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THE COMMO N WE AL TH
YONI APPELBAUM: Today, I’m joining you from Washington, D.C., and there probably couldn’t be a better place or time to discuss these questions. As I speak to you, straight down 16th Street there is a rally at the White House. Congress will be sitting at one o’clock to count the electoral votes. Meanwhile, election returns are still rolling in from the state of Georgia, where it appears that the pastor of Martin Luther King’s old church has just won election to the United States Senate, and Democrats appear poised to, with 50 seats, control the Senate going forward. These are historic times, and we’re not quite sure what history will make of them, but it’s a good time for all of us to meet today and think about what we make of history. There is anger in the streets here in D.C., and there is passion and excitement and engagement. Among the many questions that we ask today are, What does this mean for the education of America’s students—particularly around history and the foundational principles of our democracy? Over the past year, the president has pushed an effort around patriotic education and American ideals. In part, in the pushback to The New York Times’ 1619 Project but also well beyond that, he launched a 1776 Commission to promote study of America’s founding principles, as he sees them. Today’s discussion will focus on these issues and the road ahead for American history education.
I want to begin by turning to Professor Kamensky, and asking her thoughts on how to think about these issues, particularly at this moment. JANE KAMENSKY: I come from higher ed, and a pretty rarefied corner of higher ed at that. I teach the American Revolution at Harvard, offering the first lecture course on the subject in decades, which is a story in itself. In that class, I aim to share cuttingedge scholarship, much of it on the violence of the Revolutionary War, which was our first civil war, and on the ways that the American founding was shot through with the histories of slavery and dispossession. But I also mean for students to take up the work of the American Revolution as a fragile and ongoing project for which their generation bears ultimate responsibility. In many ways, it’s that work and the sense that higher ed needs fresh thinking about its responsibilities to primary and secondary ed that brought me to Educating for American Democracy, along with Michelle [Herczog]. As a scholar, I’m interested in what we might call the civic humanities—deeply researched, complex and verifiably true stories told with a lot of why with explicit civic purpose. We need to acknowledge, as Yoni said, that we hold this discussion at a moment of both peril and possibility. I think the possibility might be harder for us to see, so I want to just highlight that at the outset here. We’ve seen tremendous citizen engagement in the course of the long vicious 2020 election
