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Gary Nash: Preeminent Scholar and Committed Educator
Linda Symcox
California State University, Long Beach
| I HAVE KNOWN GARY NASH AS A FRIEND since 1969, but I only began to work with him as a colleague in 1989, when he invited me to join the National Center for History in the Schools (NCHS) as it was just forming. During the seven years I spent as Assistant and then Associate Director of the NCHS, we shared the extraordinary experience of working with teachers to develop curricula and the National History Standards, and then of defending the standards when the U.S. Government and a horde of pundits turned vehemently against them in 1994—a turning point in the national culture wars that has not been forgotten. Given this long friendship and close working relationship, I have had ample opportunity over the years to observe Gary at work, under ordinary and extraordinary conditions, and to reflect on his remarkable career as a distinguished scholar, an award-winning UCLA professor, and most unusually, as a top scholar who has also devoted a good part of his professional life to improving history education in K-12 schools. |
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As a graduate student in history and a friend of Gary's in the early 1970s, I already knew that his academic career was on a stellar trajectory. As a young scholar, Gary was a pioneer of the "new social history," a central architect in the paradigm shift that radically changed the way scholars would research and narrate U.S. history in the future. Nash turned his historical lens away from the traditional paradigm which Eric Foner has labeled "the presidential synthesis" (1991), and toward a social history that would focus on the lives of the formerly neglected masses. In his pioneering work, he helped to create a new problematic in which historians would explore the dynamic interactions of a multi-class, multiracial, and multiethnic population, not just the deeds of presidents, generals, and heroes who happened to be wealthy and white. With his first major work, Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early America (1974), Gary constructed an inclusive new narrative in which history was made not only by leaders, but also by ordinary people who acted and took matters into their own hands. They included slaves, Native Americans, women, immigrants, and the poor, who had hitherto been excluded from the grand narrative of the making of America, or who had at best been assigned only walk-on parts. Since then, Gary has continued his prolific scholarly work, playing a central role in creating a much more democratic and broad-based narrative of early American history, based on the contention that ordinary people possess individual agency and that they profoundly influence the course of history (Nash, 1979, 1988, 2005, 2006, 2008). |
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Thirty-five years on, Gary remains as ever a pioneer. In his most recent book, co-authored with Graham Russell Gao Hodges, Friends of Liberty: A Tale of Three Patriots, Two Revolutions, and a Tragic Betrayal of Freedom in the New Nation: Thomas Jefferson, Thaddeus Kosciuszko, and Agrippa Hull (2008), he has adopted a new scholarly approach, making a radical departure from his earlier work in social history by building upon it. The book tells the fascinating story of how Jefferson betrayed the trust of his friend Thaddeus Kosciuszko, the exiled Polish patriot who had fought in the American Revolution. In 1817, Kosciuszko bequeathed Jefferson his back pay from the Revolutionary War, a considerable sum, on condition that Jefferson would use it to free his slaves. Gary and his co-author argue that Kosciuszko was motivated in part by his past friendship with Agrippa Hull, the African American soldier and manservant who had been his comrade-in-arms throughout the war. Kosciuszko also took this step because, as a man of the Enlightenment, he believed that slavery must be eradicated if the promise of American freedom was to be fulfilled. But Jefferson, deeply ambivalent about the institution of slavery, did not use it to emancipate his or any other slaves, and betrayed the promise he had made to his old friend. |
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With this remarkable new book, Gary is proposing once again that we must re-examine the history of the Revolution. By focusing on Jefferson and Kosciuszko, he internationalizes the story, following the path mapped out by Robert Palmer and Jacques Godechot, which situated the American Revolution in a broader, Atlantic context. This new book represents a methodological shift away from social history, to a political and cultural approach, built around the biographies of Hull, Jefferson, and Kosciuszko. The stories of their intersecting lives create a new narrative of the Revolution, and cast a harsh light on its ultimate outcome. Jefferson's broken promise to Kosciuszko exposes the terrible contradiction at the heart of the American Revolution: the unresolved issue of slavery. Europeans who had supported the Revolution, like Kosciuszko, or Paine, or Lafayette, were bitterly disillusioned by the new nation's failure to abolish slavery. What Gary and his co-author have created is a critical, and also a deeply moving, analysis of both the greatness and the fatal shortcomings of American democracy in its formative years. |
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These two books, one of Nash's earliest and now his most recent, are just two examples of his prolific, continuously innovative work as a scholar: he has written many others in between. But his career as an academic scholar devoted to the cause of K-12 history education has been equally important, as I know from my long association with him. He was inducted into the K-12 education arena from his lofty stance as a preeminent colonial historian quite by accident. In 1988, Charlotte Crabtree of the UCLA School of Education was submitting a grant proposal to Lynne Cheney, who was then Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), for a project to reform the teaching of history that would become the National Center for History in the Schools (NCHS) at UCLA. She needed the participation of an academic historian to complete her nearly-finished proposal and approached Joyce Appleby, who was then serving as Interim Chair of the UCLA History Department. Appleby told her that she could not serve, but that Gary Nash was "just down the hall." Crabtree, with little time to spare, ran down the hall and, with her incredible luck and ability to talk just about anyone into anything, got him to sign on the dotted line. The rest, as they say, is history. |
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In his usual energetic fashion, Gary gave himself fully to his new role as Associate Director of the NCHS. During the spring and summer of 1989, he led monthly workshops with the K-12 teachers who had been selected as NCHS fellows. He designed each workshop around the research of a scholar in U.S. or world history, who would lecture and work with teachers researching primary sources on a topic of their choice. Lively discussions on how to use the documents in classrooms would follow. Gary, of course, led many of the workshops. These sessions were magical and life-changing for teachers like Gloria Sesso, Alli Jason, and David Vigilante, who have remained Associates of the NCHS ever since then. Gary and the historians he recruited for the project displayed a unique ability to make cutting-edge history accessible to elementary and high school teachers, leapfrogging the twenty years it normally takes for new research to make its way into school textbooks. This collaborative pedagogical strategy proved to be a resounding success: the California History Project, and many other programs like the Teaching American History projects, have adopted this professional development model and still use it today. Nash's work with teachers has been an important influence in promoting greater collaboration between academic historians and K-12 schoolteachers that we see regularly today. |
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This is a crucial point. I want to emphasize how Gary's work with teachers over the years was and remains a conscious effort on his part to bring the most recent scholarship directly to schoolteachers, to break down the barrier between academia and the schools, and thus to democratize the way teachers are trained. Why hide innovative scholarship in the ivory tower and delay access to it, when it can be so empowering for teachers and their students right now? Gary lives the democratic message of his own research. He has been willing to move beyond the ivory tower and bring new historical thinking directly into the schools, while at the same time maintaining his prolific scholarly output, thus creating an ongoing congruence and interaction between his research and his pedagogical practice. |
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Of course, many contributors to this volume will describe Gary's equally pioneering work as the co-director of the National History Standards Project (NHSP), along with Charlotte Crabtree. As the Assistant Director of the NHSP, I was directly involved in this unprecedented collaboration among public school teachers, state social studies specialists, school superintendents, university historians, a broad array of professional and scholarly organizations and public interest groups, parents' and teachers' organizations, and individual citizens nationwide, all with a stake in improving the teaching of history in the schools as they developed the History Standards over a thirty-month period. I was also there in 1994, when Gary heroically defended the Standards against Lynne Cheney and her neo-conservative allies, who lambasted them as a "politically-correct" version of the American past. With a single opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal, Cheney launched an acrimonious controversy over the teaching of our nation's past that would rage for eighteen months in the national press, over the airwaves, and in the halls of Congress. On January 18, 1995, the United States Senate passed, by a vote of 99 to 1, a non-binding resolution condemning the Standards as un-American. Apparently, the conservatives felt that traditional history was in danger of being relegated to the trash dump of history, and relativistic thinking, manifested in the "new social history," to which they disingenuously attached the pejorative label "post-modernism," was replacing it. Gary was now forced to defend his life's scholarly work, which long ago had been accepted as part of mainstream college-level history, against the critics who caricatured it in the media as somehow extreme and anti-American. |
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The attack was initially successful because the public naturally had difficulty accepting innovative scholarship when it was presented in this way. Raised on political narratives of heroes and leaders, many Americans responded to Lynne Cheney's rallying cry against the Standards: "Where is Robert E. Lee?" They were bewildered and angered by what appeared to be a subversive kind of scholarship that laid too much stress on the lives and deeds of ordinary people. To the public, the Standards, as they were portrayed in the press, seemed an affront to reason itself. As Lawrence Levine explains:
Certain ideas are so deeply ingrained that they do not seem like ideas at all, but rather part of the natural order of things. To challenge them seems akin to repealing the law of gravity. Thus when someone comes along who both perceives and treats them as ideas, subject to the challenges that all ideas should be exposed to, it is as if reason itself were being challenged. The notion of the melting pot—that great crucible of American environment swallowing, nurturing, transforming—and the notion of American culture as deriving primarily from northern and western Europe came to assume this aura of the natural order. Any challenges, then, no matter how scholarly and carefully rooted in the sources and the normal rules of historical discourse, have been seen by many as assaults on rationality (p. 852).
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But despite these bitter attacks, Gary persevered in his campaign to improve the teaching of history in the schools. I see his continuing effort as the latest episode in a noble tradition of scholars who have also become schoolhouse reformers. Since the early twentieth century, various scholars have been invited to work with the K-12 schools, usually at a time when politicians or the public perceive a crisis in a particular educational discipline. For example, during the 1920s and 1930s, educationist Harold Rugg put his academic career aside to write progressive high school social studies textbooks addressing the challenges of his times. As a leader of the Social Reconstruction movement, Rugg believed that schools should be in the vanguard of social reform and should directly address chronic social and economic problems through the curriculum. By 1939, his textbook series, Man and His Changing Society, had sold over a million copies, covering such topics as the involuntary immigration of slaves and the disparity between rich and poor in American society. People willingly accepted this progressive discussion during the Great Depression. However, by 1939, as the Depression began to ease and war clouds loomed ever closer, his progressive thinking became controversial. Rugg's textbooks were attacked as unpatriotic by Congress, and pulled from the shelves by his publisher. Rugg then withdrew from the fight. |
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Similarly in the early 1970s, psychologist Jerome Bruner left his position as a Harvard psychologist temporarily to develop inquiry-based social studies curricula with funding from the National Defense Education Act of 1958. Spurred on by the Sputnik crisis and the public perception that American students were falling perilously behind their Soviet counterparts in science and math education, Congress had enacted this reform to improve content knowledge in all disciplines. Over the next two decades, Bruner and scholars in other disciplines created K-12 curricula based on the structures and methods of their academic disciplines. His new inductive pedagogy for K-12 students was called "discovery" or "inquiry" learning, and so was not entirely dissimilar to Gary's pioneering work with primary documents as the "raw materials" of history and historical inquiry. In Bruner's Man a Course of Study (MACOS), students studied the indigenous peoples of Alaska, and analyzed the moral dilemmas that they faced due to the harshness of their Arctic environment. Bruner hoped that in this way sixth grade students would learn to appreciate how different societies come to understand the world in different ways, and that one kind of worldview is not necessarily better than another. The program was considered a breakthrough both in its content and its pedagogy, and won many awards. However, by 1975, it was beset by controversy. Many parents and politicians found the harsh realities of the Eskimo life, as portrayed in anthropological films, very disturbing, especially for the sixth graders who were studying it in the course. With the newly dubbed "Moral Majority" beginning to flex its political muscles, parents campaigned against the course by writing stinging opinion pieces in local newspapers and demanding that the federal funding for it be canceled. Congress soon followed their lead. In the mid 1970s, MACOS was defunded, and Bruner withdrew from the fray. |
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History has a way of repeating itself. Lynne Cheney's calls in 1988 to establish a National History Center and in 1990 to develop National History Standards were in response to another perceived crisis, this time in history education. She was one of the leaders of a well-orchestrated conservative campaign during the 1980s claiming that history and humanities education had been in steady decline since the 1960s, because "identity politics" had replaced the traditional canon of European-centered literature and history, thus eroding the nation's shared culture, and undercutting its political unity. Without a common cultural glue, these neoconservative critics argued, the future of the nation was in jeopardy (Bloom, 1987; Cheney, 1987; D'Souza, 1992; Hirsch, 1987; Ravitch & Finn; Schlesinger, 1992). So Lynne Cheney at the NEH and her ally Diane Ravitch, an Assistant Secretary at the U.S. Department of Education, jointly funded the NCHS and the NHSP to reverse this perceived decline in our shared national memory. But they were very disappointed with the results. In their view, the Standards issued in 1994 enshrined the cultural relativism that they were seeking to eradicate: hence the bitter debate that Cheney launched to discredit the Standards and restore the tired and true patriotic narrative. |
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Gary's career of public service with teachers fits within this, if you will, tradition of scholars who have ventured out of their ivory towers to bring their latest research to the schoolhouse, only to be hounded out by conservative politicians and pundits when the political tide turned. In each case, their cutting-edge scholarship, caricatured by the media, was simply too innovative, too progressive, and too advanced for what people were ready to hear. During the more conservative times brought on by World War II or by the Moral Majority of the late 1970s, Rugg's and Bruner's work could easily be characterized as belonging to the radical fringe, just as Gary Nash's was so characterized during the resurgent Republican era of the mid-1990s under the leadership of Newt Gingrich. |
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This is because of the inherent tension between the academic and public uses of knowledge. The very nature of scholarly research is to push the limits of current knowledge and question the assumptions behind it. Scholars are trained to identify gaps in current research or theory, to open up new fields of inquiry, and to re-examine old questions in the light of new knowledge. However, it can take twenty years or more before new concepts and new knowledge find their way into non-scholarly publications, public discourse, and popular culture, and since the K-12 curriculum is inherently traditional, the time-lag can be even greater. Thus, when university-based scholars such as Rugg, Bruner, or Nash lead K-12 curriculum reform movements, they inevitably encounter misunderstanding and public outrage. Unbeknownst to them, by bringing their scholarly knowledge directly into the schoolhouse, they have short-circuited the slow process society uses to absorb and accept new scholarly knowledge. Controversy is almost inevitable. |
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But let me conclude with what is a very important distinction: Gary Nash's career as a K-12 reformer diverges radically from Rugg's and Bruner's, because he did not give up the fight. After politicians and pundits hounded Rugg and Bruner out of the K-12 arena, they retreated from direct involvement with K-12 education. Rugg went off to write his memoirs, and Bruner went back to Harvard to resume his fine scholarly work on education and learning. He has continued to write scholarly books on learning, cognition, and education in a long and illustrious career. However, Gary Nash took a different course. He stayed in the K-12 arena to fight every single battle of the culture wars, and outlived his foes because he had more staying power—and a longer attention span—than the politicians who denigrated him and then moved on in search of other targets. Today, nearly fifteen years since the controversy over the History Standards, he is still running the National Center for History in the Schools, still producing K-12 history curricula and teaching materials, still participating in Teaching American History grants, still working with museums across the country, and still working directly with teachers and their students to improve the teaching of history in their schools. And all the while, he continues to publish outstanding work in early American history, demonstrating that professional development of K-12 teachers and first-rate scholarly research are not mutually exclusive, but rather that each illuminates and strengthens the other. His career proves that the very best academic scholarship and a deep personal commitment to K-12 curricular and pedagogical reform can go hand-in-hand: they are two sides of the coin of academic excellence that Gary Nash's career exemplifies. |
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References
Berliner, D. & B. Biddle. 1995. The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Frauds, and the Attack on America's Public Schools. New York: Longman.
Bloom, A. 1987. The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Bruner, J. 1992. Acts of Meaning: Four Lectures on Mind and Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Cheney, L. 1987. American Memory: A Report on the Humanities in the Nation's Public Schools. Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Humanities.
Dow, P. 1991. Schoolhouse Politics: Lessons from the Sputnik Era. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
D'Souza, D. (1992). Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus. New York: Vintage Books.
Finn, C., Jr., D. Ravitch, & T. Fancher. 1984. Against Mediocrity: The Humanities in America's High Schools. New York: Holmes & Meier.
Foner, E., ed. 1990. The New American History. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Godechot, J. L. 1965. France and the Atlantic Revolution of the Eighteenth Century, 1770–1799 (tr. Herbert H. Rowen). New York: The Free Press.
Hirsch Jr., E. D. 1987. Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company.
Levine, L. 1993. "Clio, Canons, and Culture." Journal of American History 80.3 (December 1993): 852.
Nash, G. 1970. Class and Society in Early America. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Nash, G. 1974/1992. Red, White, and Black: Peoples of Early North America. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Nash, G. 1979. The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness and the Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Nash. G. 1988. Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia's Black Community, 1720–1840. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Nash, G. 2005. The Unknown American Revolution; The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America. New York: Viking.
Nash, G. 2006. The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Nash, G. & G. Hodges. 2008. Friends of Liberty: A Tale of Three Patriots, Two Revolutions, and a Tragic Betrayal of Freedom in the New Nation: Thomas Jefferson, Thaddeus Kosciuszko, and Agrippa Hull. New York: Basic Books.
Nash, G., R. Dunn, & C. Crabtree. 1997. History on Trial: National Identity, Culture Wars, and the Teaching of the Past. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Palmer, R. R. 1959/1964. The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800 (2 vols.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Ravitch, D. & C. Finn Jr. 1987. What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know? A Report on the First National Assessment of History and Literature. New York: Harper and Row.
Rugg, H. 1941. That Men May Understand: An American in the Long Armistice. New York: Doubleday, Doran.
Schlesinger, A., Jr. 1992. The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society. New York: W. W. Norton.
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