White House Initiative on American History

Ira Berlin and Lee W. Formwalt

Two years ago the U.S. Congress, under the leadership of Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV), recognized the need to improve high school history education and appropriated $50 million to the Department of Education (DOE) to help local educational agencies enhance the teaching of American history. Last year Byrd convinced his colleagues to double the amount, and several weeks ago the DOE announced the winning proposals in this year's competition. Bill Clinton signed the first Byrd bill and George W. Bush the second. Now the White House has in a more active way joined the struggle to improve the quality of history teaching by announcing, on Constitution Day (17 September 2002), a major initiative for promoting the study of American history.

	At a Rose Garden ceremony, President George W. Bush, seen with historian David McCullough, announces a major initiative to promote the teaching of American history. One part of the initiative, "Our Documents," revolves around one hundred milestone documents that have shaped the course of American history.

The White House Initiative on American History is a three-part plan involving the National Endowment for the Humanities, National History Day, and the National Archives and Records Administration. First, NEH's "We the People" project will be expanded to include a nationwide essay contest for high school juniors who are to demonstrate how a significant event in our nation's history illustrates a principle of American democracy. NEH will also sponsor a lecture series on "Heroes in History." Second, National History Day and the National Archives are collaborating on the "Our Documents" project centered around "one hundred milestone American documents . . . that have shaped us as a people." Third, the White House will host a forum early next year on American history and civic education that will, in the words of President Bush, focus on "new policies to improve the teaching of history and civics in elementary and secondary schools, and in our colleges and universities."

For close to a century the Organization of American Historians and its predecessor, the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, have expressed interest in and concern for the state of American history education in our nation's schools, especially at the secondary level. For nearly two decades OAH has produced a quarterly teaching publication, the OAH Magazine of History, which now has a circulation of 9,000. As noted on page 19 ("Stronger History Education through Collaboration"), OAH is currently involved in myriad initiatives to improve history education--so many in fact that the OAH has recently appointed an education coordinator simply to manage these activities. It is heartening to learn the OAH's long-term interests are shared by the Congress and the White House.

Some historians have voiced concerns about the political implications of the new initiative, seeing it as but an attempt to reinitiate the destructive culture wars which entangled the study and pedagogy of history during the 1990s. Others fear that history is being mobilized for war. These concerns should be taken seriously. Certainly it is deeply disturbing that neither the directors nor officers of the OAH or the AHA were invited to participate in the formulation of the presidential initiative. But we believe that taken at its word the initiative provides an opportunity for OAH to speak to still larger audiences of historical study and, hopefully, join the presidential engagement with the study of the past. Our task is not simply to make available the most recent findings of historical research, most elegant interpretations, and most successful pedagogy, but to emphasize that American history is more than the memorization of important facts, the identification of critical icons, or homage to heroic persons and deeds. Rather, a meaningful engagement with the past is attained only by learning to think historically, appreciating the context of past events, and following that crooked road--grasping the ironies and paradoxes--that has led Americans to their own rendezvous with destiny.

True patriotism, if that be the goal of the White House initiative, can best arise from a critical--in the best sense of the word--engagement with the past. Situating "heroic" persons and their deeds in the complexity of the times in which they lived helps the American people, particularly students just beginning the process of examining the society into which they were born, in their quest to understand their own history. Rather than strengthening a commitment to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and their realization--which have often been achieved against great odds--a history that is exclusively celebratory and endlessly heroic leaves the American people susceptible to the catcalls of naysayers and to the derision of deniers of the Declaration's stirring appeal to, in Lincoln's phrase, the "better angels of our nature."

The better Americans understand their history as a complicated mixture of achievement and failure, the better equipped they will be to confront the difficult realities of the modern world. The richness and power of the American past merits more than simple glorification, for whatever the short-term benefits, flag-waving and parades offer little for the long-term and nothing enduring in terms of true education. A truly inspiring appreciation of the nation's accomplishments emerges only from a knowledge of its struggles. Telling the whole story does not diminish the American past, but rather strengthens those who live in the world that challenges them to appreciate and advance the ideals articulated in the nation's founding charters.

If we are to meet this challenge, the American people must find ways to improve the quality of history education. In this task, American historians--by glint of their special knowledge--bear a special responsibility. We must take leadership in ending the all too common practice of assigning history classes to teachers with little or no training in American history. We must construct relationships between university historians and their eighty thousand colleagues teaching history in the nation's high schools. We must start building bridges between our universities' history departments and schools of education. Our history majors--many of them future history teachers--need pedagogical training along with a far deeper understanding of the subject they plan to teach.

We have begun to tackle these problems. OAH--along with the AHA, NEH, the National Council for History Education, and National History Day--have established programs to build these bridges between professional historians and precollegiate history teachers. Perhaps most significantly, OAH has recently joined with the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in expanding its innovative program for establishing "History High Schools."

We trust that these efforts will be considered at the upcoming White House Forum on American history and civic education. Such a gathering of leaders in American history and civic education can be an opportunity for us to look at what we have done and what we can do to improve history and civics education in this country. Let us hope that historians and our government leaders take advantage of this opportunity to examine the future of teaching the past and develop a coordinated effort to rekindle historical imagination in the classroom.

Ira Berlin is president of OAH and professor of history at the University of Maryland. Lee W. Formwalt is executive director of the Organization of American Historians.