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Gary Nash: Repairing a Necessary Connection
Thomas Bender
New York University
| IT IS BOTH A GREAT PLEASURE AND A PRIVILEGE to participate in this event that honors Gary Nash for his many scholarly contributions, his manifold services to public education, and his commitment to the work of expanding public knowledge of history. We are thanking him for his remarkable engagement with the schools, as a writer of outstanding textbooks and materials for teachers developed through his work as director of the Center for Teaching History in the Schools, and, of course, the National History Standards, to say nothing of innumerable ad hoc instances of collaborations, assistance, and advocacy. |
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My contact with Gary over the years has been episodic. All of those instances except one were related to one aspect or another of his work in extending history to the schools and a larger public. The exception took place a year after completing my Ph.D. as part of a campus interview for a position UCLA. My recollection of the interview was that I was mostly clueless and somewhat overwhelmed. I did not get the job. But I did meet Gary Nash, and I learned about the innovative introductory course to American history that he and his colleagues had developed. It focused on the peoples of America. Soon thereafter, I had in my hand his wonderfully fresh synthesis of early American history, Red, White, and Black (1974). It was a great gift to a beginning teacher developing my first iteration of the U.S. Survey. Having heard about the UCLA course, I realized the book's origin and was thus excited by the history of the book itself: it was as much the intellectual product of the classroom as of the study. It was a pioneering multicultural approach to American history that seemed to respond to the diversity of the student body at UCLA. And it was a history that recognized the agency of various interacting peoples, a bit avant la lettre. My first contact with Gary was thus a lesson in the linkage between innovative scholarship and innovative teaching, both conceived as being in relation to the world we live in, especially in big cities. |
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On this occasion, the program is devoted to commentary on Gary's important contributions to public education and to the advance of historical literacy. Many of you not only know about that work, but have been participants in it. So as we historians are inclined to do, I will seek in my comments to provide a larger historical context for Gary's work. My plan is to locate the significance of Gary's career within the twentieth-century history of the discipline. What he has done, as I see it, is to recover a pattern of civic participation by historians that marked the profession a century ago, when leading scholars were also leaders in history education in the schools. He has recombined great distinction as a scholar with regular contributions to public education. |
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What he has done furthermore has large implications for the definition of the profession. He is recovering lost territory and resuming a larger sense of our professional responsibility. In the American Historical Association (AHA) report on doctoral education, The Education of Historians for the Twenty-First Century, I titled the first chapter "We Historians," making a plea for a "big tent" definition of the profession.1 Gary's career exemplifies an all-embracing "we-ness" of all historians that is essential if we are to have historical literacy in this country.
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I want to begin by bringing out what seems to me to be the underlying commitment evident in both the content of his scholarship and his efforts to enhance and enrich the teaching of history in the schools. I do not know whether Gary has ever articulated the logic that I think links his scholarship and his work for education generally. But as I see it, there is an underlying commitment concerning history and the notion of an inclusive public culture. His underlying concern, I think, is at least partly expressed in an observation about history and power made by the Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot. Trouillot's most notable scholarship concerns the historical invisibility (something changing since he wrote) of the Haitian Revolution, the impossible revolution, unthinkable even as it occurred. But it did occur, and it put forth the grandest challenge ever to the ideals of Enlightenment universalism.2 In fact, Gary quotes a key line from Trouillot in his recent book, The Unknown American Revolution: "Lived inequalities yield unequal historical power."3 I would add a corollary to that: "Unequal historical recognition yields lived inequalities." Gary's most notable scholarship, I think, has recognized unrecognized historical actors in the interest of giving them more "historical power" and thus more contemporary political recognition. |
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To justify this point, one could cite all of his books. But let me give only a short list of the ones most important for my own thinking about the field. In Red, White, and Black, as I have indicated, he recognized and revealed the complex interaction and the agency by peoples of different cultures and colors. He brought Native Americans and African Americans into history, as actors, not as victims or as mere background for the actions of the European colonizers and slave masters. His study of cities in the American Revolution, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (1979), is my favorite. I like it in part and have often assigned it because it plays to my interest in cities. But its historiographical significance is much broader and more important. At a time when the reigning interpretation of the revolution was Bernard Bailyn's neo-whig account, emphasizing the power of ideology, the ideas of a tiny elite unfolding to make a new nation, Gary's book showed more ideologies and more dimensions of ideologies, representing different classes in the society and the tensions and conflicts within colonial cities. His account revealed many more and more diverse actors bringing about change.4 His very recent book, The Unknown Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America, widens the canvas even more. And, finally, I want to mention Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia's Black Community, 1720–1840 (1988). Here, too, seemingly powerless people with limited resources are revealed as agents of their own formation as a community. What all of these studies—and others could be cited—do is to bring those actors overlooked by history into history, giving them what Trouillot calls "historical power." By being brought into history, various peoples on the margins become historical facts. Historical facts count; they act upon history, helping to make a future. |
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My point and my perspective, then, is that in his scholarship, Gary has broadened the dimensions of the public that history must recognize, and his work on behalf of public education brought history lessons grounded in deep and scrupulous scholarship to a wider public, which has meant, in part, bringing those lost histories into the light of classrooms. Partly, such history concerns recognition—Trouillot's point—and the implications of that. But it is also about historical method and theories of social change.
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In working with the schools and other institutions that bring history to a larger public, Gary repaired and gave new energy to a broken collaboration between academic historians and historians in the schools. A century ago, that collaboration had been vital, but by the time Gary (and I) entered the profession it, had long since fallen into disrepair. The repair work still has a way to go, but no one has done as much as Gary to get the repairs under way, opening pathways for we historians to find each other in that big tent of history, where university teachers and K-12 teachers can meet each other again as colleagues, as fellow teachers, like Frederick Jackson Turner commonly did with Wisconsin teachers in the 1890s.5 |
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I want to remain in the 1890s a bit, for that is when historians—through the American Historical Association—began to take responsibility for the teaching of history in American schools. Turner and his close colleague, medievalist Charles Homer Haskins, were deeply involved at the University of Wisconsin, and one of Turner's most important essays (not as important as the frontier essay, but one with a bolder yet title, "The Significance of History") was written for Wisconsin teachers.6 |
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In 1896, the American Historical Association established what it called the Committee of Seven.7 The committee was charged to make a case for the importance of history in the schools and to recommend a curriculum. The first point to be made about the committee concerns personnel. This committee was made up of the most distinguished research scholars in the country. It was chaired by the constitutional scholar Andrew C. McLaughlin, and it included Herbert Baxter Adams, who established the famous historical seminar at Johns Hopkins; Albert Bushnell Hart at Harvard, editor of the 26-volume American Nation Series that in the first years of the twentieth century brought professional scholarship to general readers; Lucy Salmon, who was not only a distinguished historian at Vassar, but also very active in a variety of educational enterprises; and Turner's colleague, Haskins, among others. |
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The second point on the committee is that they were successful. Their report, published by a trade publisher in 1899, established the basic modern curriculum for the schools (only recently expanded to four fields including world history): ancient (mostly Greek and Roman; later, in the 1920s, the Chicago historian James Breasted would move Egypt into the ancient part), medieval and modern Europe, and United States history and civics.8 Their report carried weight. The power of the report itself as written and the stature of the committee not only persuaded local and state school boards to give history a substantial place in the curriculum, but also to organize it roughly along the lines recommended by the committee. Even more remarkably, the historians monitored developments in the schools over the next several years. There were follow up reports in 1908 and 1911, and they established a magazine, The History Teacher's Magazine, in 1909. |
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Gary, as you all know, was president of the Organization of American Historians. In that position, he took a leading role in the movement within the Organization of American Historians—still underway—to better engage not only K-12 teachers, but public history more broadly. Though few realized it at the time, he and his colleagues were reconnecting with some of the early ambitions of the organization, originally founded in 1907 as the Mississippi Valley Historical Association.9 It was established under the auspices of state historical societies, particularly the Nebraska State Historical Society, rather than university historians. In fact, academic historians were a minority of the members during its first twenty years. It was populated with teachers, librarians, and historical museum curators and archivists, as well as university people. The historical concerns of the organization were broadly construed, including historical sites, historical museums, and even the preservation of natural landscapes and historical structures. And its proceedings early on had a special section on teaching materials for K-12 teachers. |
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Some of the most notable of the progressive historians were heavily engaged with public education. These figures included Charles A. Beard, James Harvey Robinson, and Carl Becker. All were involved with teachers. Like Turner in Wisconsin, Becker met with Kansas teachers, while Beard met with various teacher organizations in the mid-Atlantic states. Merle Curti, Turner's last Ph.D. student, taught at Teacher's College, Columbia, and it was there that he took on a student named Richard Hofstader, whose dissertation he directed. And it was there, too, that he wrote The Growth of American Thought, which won the Pulitzer Prize. He also became a wealthy man and philanthropist with the earnings of the high school history textbook he wrote. |
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These historians were leaders of the movement to bring history into Social Studies. While the incorporation of history into Social Studies has often been read as a diminution of history, the initial aim was to expand history beyond the usual focus on political elites. The assumption was that history would be the spine for the study of social development and societal issues. At its best, Social Studies still does that, but that success is, unfortunately, too rare. Social Studies has too often come to mean a grab bag of social issues and history teachers not trained in history. |
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There are doubtless many reasons for the failure of the Social Studies movement to accomplish what historians like Beard had hoped. But one of them was a formal decision by the American Historical Association and a kind of careless inattention by historians generally that resulted in leaving responsibility for K-12 history to the National Council for Social Studies. This abandonment of education in the schools by historians is what Gary Nash and his co-authors of History on Trial called the "long walk of historians."10 |
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In fact, the historical profession walked away from more than the schools in the late 1930s and 1940s. The activities of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association that I mentioned were nearly all abandoned in the 1940s, and the same must be said of the American Historical Association. The historians' walk away from the schools was part of a larger transformation, a narrowing of the territory of the historical profession. The AHA at this time also cut loose historical society, museum, and archival professionals, who went on to establish the American Association for State and Local History and the Society of American Archivists. These self-mutilations are now being repaired with the profession's embrace (or rather re-discovery) of public history, and with the movement on behalf of public education being commemorated here—the work undertaken in a very big way by Gary Nash, but with many other workers pitching in. The result, I hope, will be a full repair and then some of a half century's damage to history, the schools, and the profession. |
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I agree that the long walk set the stage for the uproar about the history standards—or that part of the uproar that was genuine as opposed to political opportunism. Because of that long walk, massive changes that were taking place within the discipline of history were not being communicated to the K-12 educational establishment; not to the teachers, but also not to school boards, education writers, nor other organizations that could have been allies. The history being written in the 1980s bore little resemblance to what anyone 50 years old or more learned in high school or college. Just recall how profoundly the experience of the 1960s and 1970s transformed the methods, foci, and boundaries of history, with implications not only for the content, but also modes of teaching history. Making women, Indians, and enslaved people actors in history was a shock. Looking at their experience through their eyes was novel and unsettling for those used to the view from Mount Rushmore. |
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Presumably, these changes explain the comment of Senator Diane Feinstein, actually one of the more literate of our Senators, in stating her opposition to the National History Standards. Condemning the Standards and interpretive history, she insisted that when she was a student at Stanford, Thomas Bailey simply taught the "facts." And, apparently, for her that was all history was and is about. No doubt, the same can be said for the legislators in Florida who passed a law in 2006 requiring that American history "be viewed as factual, not as constructed."11 |
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A good deal has been written about the conflict over the History Standards, and I defer to all of those explanations, but still I want to mention another context for the continuing history wars. Current textbook battles, notoriously in Texas, and comments made by Lynne Cheney and others of her ilk in the wake of 9/11 persuade me that history, no less than biology, is confronting a substantial and vocal minority of fundamentalists who resist the very lesson we want to teach: critical thinking and a "historical sense," or, as the Committee of Seven report put it in 1899, "historical-mindedness."12 |
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Let me take as my text for opening up this issue a book published in 1928 by Walter Lippmann. It was titled American Inquisitors, and given that the Scopes Trial was conducted the year before, one can guess just the event he had in mind.13 And Lippmann does tell the tale of Dayton, Tennessee, where that trial played out, but the book has a dual focus. He also finds an inquisition in Chicago, where the issue was the teaching of American history, or, more specifically, an attack on history textbooks. In Dayton, the law against the teaching of evolution was at issue, while in Chicago, Mayor William (Big Bill) Thompson triggered what may have been the first of the history wars. What linked the two events, according to Lippmann, was that science and scholarship were brought before the bar of popular faith, or, as he put it, these two "attacks" were "made by churchmen and by patriots in the name of God and country."14 |
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The issue in the Scopes Trial is pretty well known: fundamentalists challenged the teaching of evolution in a Tennessee high school. The Chicago controversy is less well known, but its substance is hardly surprising. Thompson challenged the "New History," identified with James Harvey Robinson and Charles A. Beard, particularly Beard's famous (or infamous) analysis of the economic interests that the Founding Fathers had in the Constitution they drafted. Thompson actually went so far as to have a staffer publicly burn a book by one of Beard's followers—Arthur M. Schlesinger's New Viewpoints in American History (1922). Schlesinger's book nicely exemplified the aims of the "New History," bringing history to bear upon contemporary issues, including a chapter on "Women in American History." It also included a chapter on immigration, a topic very much on the politician's mind. But that did not save the book from the flames. The main target, however, was another Beardian, David Muzzey, one of the most successful school textbook writers of the first half of the twentieth century. According to Thompson, there was not enough coverage of Irish, Polish, and German American contributions to American history. These groups were, needless to say, of political interest to Thompson. |
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The attack was founded on two concerns. First, the new socio-economic analysis seemed to diminish the stature of the American founders, who had been increasingly sacralized in the early twentieth century. The other had to do with representation. "All nationalities," Thompson insisted, "are entitled to a place in the sun... and our national heroes are the stars in the firmament of our patriotism."15 His interest was not as generous as he presumed it was—or wanted his audience to think it was. His concern was for the presence of Irish, Germans, and Poles; the absence of African Americans in histories by Beard and the Beardians did not bother Thompson, though, as we all know, African Americans had a substantial presence in Chicago by the 1920s. |
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What does all of this have to do with evolution? Is there something in common that made innovations in historical writing and teaching—and evolutionary theory—emerge together in the 1920s and today? I think so; Lippmann was on to something. He linked the two cases by calling them both "episodes of a wide conflict between scholarship and popular faith, between freedom of thought and popular rule, which irritates American politics with deep discords."16 |
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There is something here that helps clarify events in the 1920s and today. The difference between fundamentalists on one side and professional historians and biologists on the other derives from the degree to which they value or do not value the ethic of inquiry. The fundamentalism in the thinking of both the churchmen and the patriots is an assumption that knowledge is fixed and eternal, while for scientists and historians, it is the object of continual inquiry and revision. Darwin's big challenge, as Dewey pointed out in his 1909 classic essay, "The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy," was to make change, not permanence, the way of the universe and of truth and beauty.17 That is what fundamentalists were resisting, and I suspect that remains the case. |
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More can be said about the similarity between the evolution debate and the history one. Both were engaged with fundamental questions of identity, one national identity, the other biological or human identity. Both the newer history and evolutionary thinking introduced complex theories based on necessarily incomplete evidence, often understood as "relativism" when simple facts are preferred and understood. In yet another way, the two are linked. The human narrative, whether of biological life or social life, is favored so long as it is an immanent unfolding of an ideal: God's intentions for Adam and Eve and the human family in one case, and the realization over time of the ideals of the Founding Fathers in the other. The idea of conflict and struggle as the motor of American national history is no more compatible with this fundamentalism than is natural selection as the mechanism that moves natural history. Using historical study as critical thinking, and history-making as a matter of historical actors (including the often historically excluded) who produced claims rather than awaited an unbidden appearance of democratic rights and opportunities, creates challenges to fundamentalist thinking. |
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Finally, both controversies revealed a breach between the working scientist or historian and the general public. What is a technique of practice for the scientist or historian is philosophy to the layperson. Much of the conflict and confusion over biology and history is the result of scientific and historical illiteracy. It may surprise both historians and biologists to find themselves as common targets. But it may also make them potential collaborators in improving science education and history education. |
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Life today and life as we might imagine it to be in the future will almost certainly require an education that teaches comfort with contingent truths. It will also demand a commitment to rigorous methods of fixing our beliefs while maintaining openness to the unexpected, the novel, the falsifying piece of evidence. That will be our most important challenge and gift to our students. |
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Gary has given us all a platform on which we can stand to do that work. But, as he has shown, we cannot huddle together on the platform. We may need it to store our tools and occasionally to regroup, but we must get down on the ground, where Gary has been at work. He has taken more than a few body blows along the way, and we might take some ourselves if we follow his example. But, then, do not the marvelous histories he has written teach us that history is made through struggle—more often than not requiring hanging in there for the long haul—as Gary has done? |
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Notes
1. Thomas Bender, Colin Palmer, and Philip Katz, The Education of Historians for the Twenty-First Century (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004).
2. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1995).
3. Gary B. Nash, The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (New York: Viking, 2005), xviii.
4. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967).
5. Ray Allen Billington, Frederick Jackson Turner: Historian, Scholar, Teacher (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 250. See also, Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of History," in Frederick Jackson Turner, Frontier and Section, ed. Ray A. Billington (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1961), 11–27.
6. Ibid.
7. My account of this committee and the historical relations of the American Historical Association to education in the schools is based on Robert Orrill and Lynn Shapiro, "From Bold Beginnings to an Uncertain Future: The Discipline of History and the History of Education," American Historical Review 110 (2005), 727–51.
8. Committee of Seven, The Teaching of History in the Schools (A Report to the American Historical Association; New York: Macmillan, 1899).
9. For the activities of the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, I rely upon Ian Tyrrell's detailed study and reflections, "Public at the Creation: Places, Memory, and Historical Practice in the Mississippi Valley Historical Association, 1907–1950," Journal of American History 94 (2007), 19–46.
10. Gary B. Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Ross Dunn, History on Trial (New York: Knopf, 1997), 36, 37, 65, 158. See also, Orrill and Shapiro, "From Bold Beginnings to an Uncertain Future."
11. For this statement and the American Historical Association's response, see American Historical Association, "AHA Council Decisions," 11 January 2007 <http://www.historians.org/press/2007_01_08_CouncilDecisions.cfm> (accessed 20 May 2008).
12. Committee of Seven, 24.
13. Walter Lippmann, American Inquisitors (New Brunswick, NJ: 1993, orig. 1928).
14. Ibid., 7.
15. Quoted in Jonathan Zimmerman, Whose America: Culture Wars in the Public Schools (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 21. It was Zimmerman's book that brought Lippmann's book to my attention.
16. Lippmann, 8.
17. John Dewey, "The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy," in Perry Miller, ed., American Thought (New York: Holt & Rinehart, 1954), 213–224.
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