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AHR Forum
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How history is taught in the public schools is a recurrent issue.
It is also a persistently divisive issue. Robert Orrill
and Linn Shapiro argue that for decades historians
have failed to provide needed intellectual and institutional leadership
in this struggle. However, Orrill and Shapiro contend that this
current failure of leadership repudiates a past of school policy
activism by historians. By resurrecting an activist past of policy
engagement, Orrill and Shapiro want to compel historians to enter
the fray again by renewing that earlier commitment. They insist
that historians have an ethical as well as a professional obligation
to participate in the development of policies for teaching history
in the schools. Historians in the past accepted those responsibilities,
they maintain, and so must those in the present. Orrill and Shapiro
challenge historians to debate the question.
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And so do we. This Forum is the
eighth installment of a format in which we solicit comments from
readers rather than commission responses to be published along with
the essay. We will host a moderated electronic discussion between
Orrill and Shapiro and those who wish to comment on their essay.
The discussion will take place September 26 - October 9, 2005 (new
date), on the AHR web site at
http://www.historycooperative.org/ahr/Forums.html
. Participants can send questions or comments of up to 700 words.
Guidelines will be posted on the discussion sign-in page. Our primary
goals for the discussion are to make the exchanges as open and useful
as possible and to ensure that they comply with the established
standards of the AHR. After the discussion has concluded,
the exchanges will become a permanent part of the electronic version
of this Forum Essay. Questions about the process can be sent to
American Historical Review, 914 E. Atwater Ave., Bloomington,
IN 47401, or to our e-mail address:
ahr@indiana.edu
.
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