Rethinking American history in a post 9/11 world - Featured Topic - September 11, 2001 - transcending boundaries in American history education

Liberal Education, Spring, 2003 by Eric Foner

IN 1948, ROY F. NICHOLS, a distinguished scholar of the Civil War era, published a short essay about the Second World War's likely impact on American historians. Nichols predicted a sweeping "reorientation of historical thinking." "Any great disturbance in the world of action or intellect," he wrote, "produces very noticeable effects upon the methods and controlling thought patterns of historians. It is probable that the recent war will prove no exception."

We have recently lived through our own "great disturbance." September 11 was not--at least, not yet--as transformative an event as World War II. Yet it undoubtedly will lead historians to rethink how we study and teach the American past. This, indeed, is as it should be. All history, the saying goes, is contemporary history. The past forty years have demonstrated how people instinctively turn to the past to help understand the present and how events draw our attention to previously neglected historical subjects. The "second wave" of feminism gave birth to a flourishing subfield of women's history. The Reagan Revolution inspired a cottage industry in the history of American conservatism. These and other such developments have enriched our understanding of American history and expanded the cast of characters who occupy the historical stage.

The owl of Minerva takes flight at dusk--historians, that is, prefer to wait until events have concluded before subjecting them to historical analysis. Historians are still uncertain how it will affect their craft. The clearest blueprint for new directions in historical education have come from outside the academy, in a spate of statements by conservative commentators. In a speech less than a month after the tragedy, Lynne Cheney, wife of the vice president and former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, insisted that calls for more intensive study of the rest of the world amounted to blaming America's "failure to understand Islam" for the attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Then, Dinesh D'Souza weighed in with What's So Great About America (note that there is no question mark in the title), a book that seeks to rally the American people by contending that principles like freedom and religious toleration are uniquely "Western" beliefs. For D'Souza, the only reason to study other parts of the world is to point out our superiority to them. The publisher's ad for his book identifies those who hold alternative views as "people who provide a rationale for terrorism." William Bennett, in his recent work Why We Fight, claims that scholars with whom he disagrees "sow widespread and debilitating confusion" and "weaken the country's resolve."

Critical approach to history

Like all momentous events, September 11 is a remarkable teaching opportunity. But only if we use it to open rather than to close debate. Critical intellectual analysis is our responsibility--to ourselves and to our students. Explanation is not a justification for murder, criticism is not equivalent to treason, and offering a historical analysis of evil is not the same thing as consorting with evil.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche identified three approaches to history--the monumental, antiquarian, and critical. Today's calls to narrow the range of acceptable discussion to what Nietzsche called monumental or celebratory history, themselves have a long lineage. In every country, versions of the past provide the raw material for nationalist and patriotic sentiments. In this country, such calls have mounted at times of nation-building (such as the first half of the nineteenth century), perceived national fragmentation (such as the 1890s and 1990s, both decades of widespread concern over mass immigration and cultural disunity), and during wars. During the Cold War leading historians celebrated the solution of major social problems, the "end of ideology" and the triumph of a liberal "consensus" in which all Americans, except malcontents and fanatics, shared the same mainstream values.

Walter Lippmann once wrote that the function of good journalism is to ensure that people are not surprised. The same can be said of good history. The past that historians portray must be one out of which the present can plausibly have grown. The problem with the consensus history of the 1950s, for example, was not simply that it was incomplete but that it left students utterly unprepared to understand American reality. The civil rights revolution, divisions over Vietnam, Watergate--these seemed to spring from nowhere, without discernible roots in the American past. The self-absorbed, super-celebratory history now being promoted--a history lacking in nuance and complexity--will not enable students to make sense of our increasingly interconnected world. We need a historical framework that eschews pronouncements about our own superiority and prompts greater self-consciousness among Americans and greater knowledge of those arrayed against us.

Issues on the historical agenda