An American History for the 250th

An edited version of this essay originally appeared in the Spring 2026 (Vol. 21) issue of SAPIR, under the title “A Return to Teaching History: How Ignorance of the Past Endangers Us All.” It is republished with permission by SAPIR: Ideas for a Thriving Jewish Future.

History is not supposed to be America’s long suit. Our greatest national poet, Walt Whitman, celebrated pioneers who cheerfully sing

All the past we leave behind,
We debouch upon a newer, mightier world, varied world;
Fresh and strong the world we seize…

And history has grown even less so, as the focus of American education has, over the last century-and-a-half, shifted away from the formation of citizens to the training of employees. In elementary and secondary education, history has been increasingly squeezed out by demands for more math and language-arts teaching. Partly this is the byproduct of good intentions and unintended consequences. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 was supposed to provide federal heft for improving the teaching of reading and math; what it produced, however, was a drop of over seventy percent in the instructional time spent on history, music and civics across the nation’s 15,000 school districts. By 2014, the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that only 18 percent of American middle-schoolers could be considered “proficient” in American history; by 2022, average scores in middle-school history assessments had declined another nine percent. Several years ago, I quizzed one of my classes at Gettysburg College about their high school history textbooks. Half of them hadn’t had one; the other half – literally half – had been issued Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, which reduces that history to a series of simple binaries “of slaveowner against slave, landlord against tenant, corporation against worker, rich against poor.”

No wonder, then, that since 2011, the numbers of history majors in American colleges and universities has declined by a staggering 33 percent. According to Benjamin Schmidt, who analyzed this decline for the American Historical Association in 2018, “Students and their parents seem to be thinking a lot more that they need to major in something practical,” and “history, humanities, English, and philosophy are not those practical majors.” They are not entirely wrong, either, since the number of college and university teaching positions advertised on H-Net has collapsed from a high 742 in 2007 to 285 in 2023, with only 61 of those positions being open to new-career historians of the United States. Nor is the future likely to improve. Today’s undergraduates have lived all their educational lives on keyboards and screens, and I have had to deal with more and more students whom I cannot send to the archives to do research because, quite simply, they cannot read cursive.

There is a price to be paid for this. History is the meta-narrative; everything in human experience and knowledge has a history, and without knowledge of that history we are condemned to a constant recovery from the starting-line, as though we were stuck in Bill Murray’s Groundhog Day. History is also the second-most common human curiosity. As soon as we have asked what is it, we ask where did it come from, and that is the question history sets itself to answer. Adam Smith once remarked that the thing which separates humans from dogs is that humans practice economic division of labor; but the thing which separates them even more is the human awareness of a past and the proclivity for casting that memory in the form of narrative. That is an impulse as old and deep as the cave-paintings of Lascaux and as recent as last-night’s documentary. And history presides over more even than narrative: whether it’s Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire series, Shakespeare’s plays, or Verdi’s Aida, history has been the informer of all the other arts.

But looming up behind all of these in importance is the sense of identity that history imparts to individuals and societies. My father was a wandering Aramean was the first statement of Jewish identity (in Deuteronomy 26:5), and those words appear in the central portion of the Passover Haggadah (הַגָּדָה), in a lengthy recitation of Jewish history and suffering. The experience of the past forms our present; who we are is who we were. And this is true for more than Jews. St. Paul exhorted the first generation of Christians to connect their history to that of the Jews: Our ancestors were all under the cloud and … they all passed through the sea. They were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea. The same sense of history as identity was true for the Roman republic. “To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child,” scoffed the great lawyer, Marcus Tullius Cicero. “For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?”

If you want to measure how much is lost by the neglect of history, whether in teaching or writing, ask those who have suffered under persecution. For Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the erasure of history is the first strategy of tyrants, who know that wiping out the past gives the oppressed no ground on which to resist in the present. “A people which no longer remembers has lost its history and its soul,” Solzhenitsyn said in 1976. “To fight for our memory, for our memory of what things were like — that is the task of the artist.” That fight was the task to which Solzhenitsyn applied himself in The Gulag Archipelago, and it is worth noticing that fifteen years later, the Soviet tyranny collapsed.

The dictators understand this, and they tremble. Much as every despot has come to power promising better future worlds of various sorts, the totalitarians really look first to control and manipulate history. The great Czech novelist, Milan Kundera, saw this in the eastern European Soviet bloc. “They shout that they want to shape a better future, but it’s not true,” Kundera objected. The autocrats “want to be masters of the future only for the power to change the past.” This is why, Kundera insisted (like Solzhenitsyn) that “the first step in liquidating a people … is to erase its memory.” “Destroy its books, its culture, its history,” said Kundera, “then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.”

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So why, then, do we run so carelessly the risks entailed by the ignorance of history? First, we should say the obvious: taking care of the past, as the task of historians, is not easy. There is, after all, so much of it, and no single person can hope to be master of more than comparatively small slivers. Even within those slivers, the work of archival research and the parsing-out of patterns requires a persistence and a wisdom which are sufficient to exhaust a lifetime. No one who aspires to do the work of history should embark on it with anything less than the wildest and most preoccupied form of love – or, what one of my old teachers called Sitzfleisch, by which he meant the capacity to sit for interminable lengths of time in archives and libraries, turning over one page after another.

Second, and almost as obvious, are the contradictory returns one is likely to garner from the evidence. The moment one rises above the most simple historical statements – as in: the United States entered World War One during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson – tension and debate begin to animate the presentation. Still more contradiction is liable to emerge as new and unanticipated sources of information surface, not unlike the discovery provided in November, 1998, by DNA testing that Thomas Jefferson had likely fathered at least one (and probably all) of six children borne by Sally Hemings, or the revelations from the old Soviet archives which indicated that embarrassingly well-placed Americans in the 1950s had spied for the USSR.

But there are some particular difficulties in the writing and teaching of history which belong to American history alone. The first of these has already been alluded to: that the American Republic is (as the Great Seal of the United States proclaims) a novus ordo seclorum, and consequently represents a fresh start for human history which renders all pasts irrelevant to Americans. This futurism may be what the French Revolution and many subsequent revolutions since then have believed about themselves, and what that talented propagandist for the American Revolution, Tom Paine, believed when he wrote in 1776 that Americans “have it in our power to begin the world over again.” But the architects of the Revolution did not propose doing away with all pasts. They wanted to be rid of the world of false hierarchies which had grown up for centuries around the necks of European nations, in just the same way that Galileo and Newton had rid Europe’s intellectual world of the false hierarchies of Aristotelian physics in favor of the natural physics of gravity. But their experiment was novus because, like Galileo and Newton, it dared to “recur to the first principles” of governance, so that the American Revolutionaries industriously dusted off Polybius, Plutarch, Thucydides, Vergil, Cicero, and Xenophon as though passing an exam in classics. And Thomas Jefferson, wrote James Duane, was “the greatest rubber off of dust that he had ever met with.”

Nor was the generation of the American Founders shy about requiring the teaching of the Revolution’s history to succeeding generations. It was critical to them that the earliest school textbooks be filled with a “number of stories, mostly taken from the history of America, and adorned with … a short and easy explanation of the Constitution of the United States” in which “the great principles of liberty, and of the federal government, are laid down and explained.” A century later, the Swiss traveler, Georges Fisch, was impressed by how “the schools of the North are centers of the most intense patriotism. Children are taught songs that excite their young heads and fire their young hearts.”

But there is another difficulty in cultivating a permanent respect for history in American minds, and that is the weakness our imagination has for conspiracy theories. The American Revolution was an experiment in government from the bottom-up, without hierarchies and aristocrats, and this has fostered the sense in American minds that we are an exceptional people. This is not entirely unfounded: “We have as a people no past and very little present, but a boundless and glorious future,” said Frederick Douglass, himself once a slave, but who devoutly believed that American mobility and self-transformation were without a copy anywhere else in the world. But there is a difference between being exceptional within history and imagining that we are an exception from history, and can make it up from whatever point seems convenient. The Confederacy, for instance, invented a history around race and soil; but it was really little more than an accusation that one half of the American nation had conspired against it. The Confederates were, if anything, obsessed with conspiracy, since they imagined a slave insurrection around every corner, and tried to erase that terror by confecting the fairy-tale of the happy and contented slave.

Conspiracy masquerades as explanation, whether of the past or present. But especially when it concentrates on explaining the past, it substitutes for the complexity of history the all-or-nothing εὕρηκα of sensational plotting. The most infamous and persistent conspiracy theory has always been antisemitism, but it certainly has not stopped there. Many of the Revolutionary generation spoke of Britain’s imperial tax-gatherers as a conspiracy against their customary liberties. Once in place, the conspiracy-hunting habit became endemic in American minds. Mercy Otis Warren’s 1805 history of the Revolution accused the Federalists of “a conspiracy” to re-plant “hereditary distinctions and noble orders” in America, and ever since, Americans have been uncovering conspiracies, from Ford’s Theatre and Dealey Plaza all the way to The Matrix.

The appeal of the conspiracy theory is two-fold. First, in America, there is no aristocracy whose simple existence is a reminder that there are few sensational mysteries in the past; and without a shared source of cultural authority, any answer to the questions of the past becomes as good as another, rather rational or merely impulsive. Second, conspiracy theories offer those who have been initiated into them the thrill of a special knowledge, a secret gnosis which none but initiates enjoy, and which explains everything (a sure sign that, like a plastic decoder ring, it explains nothing).

Occasionally, conspiracy theory takes the form of a harmless eccentricity; after all, the intensity with which a handful have insisted that John Wilkes Booth was the agent of a conspiracy headed by Edwin M. Stanton to murder Lincoln, and that he escaped capture to live out a life incognito in Oklahoma (or Texas, take your pick), has not noticeably affected American foreign policy or the price of eggs. But there are other conspiracy theories along the political spectrum which have a more mischievous ambition, and more malevolent followings. There is, on the political Right, so-called ‘Christian nationalism,’ which wishes to believe that the United States was founded by self-conscious Christians to be a self-consciously Christian republic, only to have that identity spirited-away by piratical secularists, globalists, and you-know-who. But the political Left has had its own share of conspiracy theories over the years, making money-madness, class-madness and other madnesses the sole and secret drivers of American history. The first would have us adopt domestic policies which would make religion the standard of civic virtue, while the other would make the same demand for its favorite forms as well. No one, and least of all myself, has any wish to dismiss the importance of religion or money or class in American life. (That would require another conspiracy theory). But 250 years and a population of three hundred million people do not resolve themselves into such quick formulas, or along such simple and uncomplicated lines. They lack, in other words, Sitzfleisch.

Good history, with all its complexity and self-contradiction, all its many voices and desires, inoculates against conspiracy theories; it invites reason to judge and holds off panic and fear that some kind of heretofore unsuspected subversion is at work. It is an intellectual guardrail against rage and vindictiveness.

As Americans settle into the semiquincentennial anniversary of their independent republic, it might be worth taking the advice of a contemporary of the Revolution, Samuel Johnson, in his 1759 philosophical novel Rasselas: “There is no part of history so generally useful as that which relates the progress of the human improvement, the gradual improvement of reason, the successive advances of science … and all the revolutions of the intellectual world.” We do a great wrong to the victims of oppression and theft – and who among us is silly enough to pretend that there are no such victims – by producing ‘nationalist’ soap operas in which all the brothers have been valiant and all the sisters virtuous. Americans should confess the shortcomings of their history as full parts of their identity, and for good and ill.

You cannot tell fictions of purity and expect them to carry the weight of historical fact; but you cannot tell fictions of unrelenting gloom without delivering a demoralized people into the hands of the world’s tormentors. No one has loved stories of American failure more than those who feared what American success might do to their demented dreams of power. Alongside the failures, Americans should entertain a particular curiosity for America’s ideas and for its extraordinary improvements simply in the day-to-day living conditions of its people. Josiah Royce, America’s most needlessly-neglected philosopher, insisted that in America, “Wherever you go, you find the typical American sensitive to ideas, curious about doctrines … disposed to plan great things for his country and for his community, proud of both, jealous for their honor, and discontented with the life that now is.” It is about time we took that estimate seriously, and flung away the Whitmanesque notion that Americans are only interested in the bottom line.

By the same token, it will take only a brief glance through Robert Gordon’s epic The Rise and Fall of American Growth (2016) or Robert William Fogel’s The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100 (2004) to realize that in little more than a single generation, Americans leapt from a still-medieval reliance on candles and muscle-power to the telegraph, the steamboat and the railroad; that not a single American home was wired for electricity in 1880, but 100 percent of them were by 1940; that 37 percent of American deaths in 1900 were due to infectious diseases, but only five percent by 1955; that all the hard-surface roads in America in 1900 would have stretched only from New York City to Boston. In the long run of human affairs, these are accomplishments which almost beggar description.

Even the short end of the American stick is a position other nations and societies over the centuries could only have beheld with envy. This is a history worth telling at the 250^th – a history built around a great idea and a great truth but which has been served by frail human beings who have not always loved those greatnesses as they should – but who at least embody that greatness. It is a history that we should especially be telling to each other.

In the desert of the heart,
Let the healing fountain start.
In the prison of his days,
Teach the free man how to praise.
(—W. H. Auden)