This article is a brief introduction in a series on American history.
Applied to countries, the words “nation” and “state” take on different meanings. A nation is a culturally and socially cohesive unit of people, usually with similar ethnicity, faith, norms, and mores. A state is an apparatus of government—a structure of organization, administration, and power. Neither are mutually dependent—the Kurds of the Middle East have no state, yet consider themselves a nation, for instance.
Many countries today are “nation-states”, that is, a culturally distinct nation of people wedded to a state built by them for purposes of their own government. It’s obvious that America has a central government which claims to represent all Americans—but can we claim the United States is a nation-state?
It’s of course unavoidable that America as originally founded was a government of the Anglo-Saxons, by the Anglo-Saxons, and for the Anglo-Saxons. But America is a nation built upon an idea, not an identity. The lofty claims made in the Declaration of Independence appeal more to mankind than to any race. This has made America into an unprecedented beneficiary of immigration from Germany, Ireland, Italy, China, India, Japan, Russia, Mexico, etc. Though it took longer, the full rights of citizenship were ultimate extended to the African-Americans and American Indians who had inhabited the continent since the Declaration was signed. We know, of course, that these changes did not come without prejudice; but to expect otherwise would be to give human nature credit it emphatically does not deserve.
Because America is built from an idea, it is singularly dependent on education. In the globalized world, education is important to all countries, needed to equip the workforce of the future for the jobs of the future, and give young people opportunities for productive and successful lives. This applies to America as to other countries. But in America, the education of history, a focus on the American story and what it means, is the bulwark that preserves the American ideal and determines how future generations will interpret and apply it.
This peculiar necessity surely plays a role in driving our obsessive controversies over education—from kindergarten to college. American political debates make battlegrounds out of classrooms and PTA meetings. Some find Critical Race Theory to be a distorting lens, applying a single and ideological standard across centuries of complex events. Others cry foul at any law passed that seeks to impose a patriotic, positive spin on American history (Florida being the most top-of-mind at the time of writing).
It’s difficult enough to define exactly what history consists of. The past is the complicated mess of personalities, motives, and events—much like the present. We can only make this to be objective insofar as we ourselves are objective—that is, not very. For Americans, it’s even more difficult, because we ask more of our history. It isn’t just a recollection of “what happened”. For us, history needs to answer: what does America mean?
This is a completely different question, with political and ideological considerations of all stripes often obscuring truth-seeking and curiosity. For our purposes, I have taken two popular U.S. history books, which I will describe below, using words from the introductory portions of each, in order of their publication.
In the Red Corner—Howard Zinn
First written in 1980 and then updated several times, A People’s History of the United States tells America’s history with an emphasis on the forgotten. Gone is the focus on presidents and captains of industry—in its place is history through the eyes of the everyman. The book’s author, Howard Zinn, was a professor at Boston University who made activism a way of life. As written in the introduction, he was “more comfortable on a picket line than at a session of the Organization of American Historians.” The book itself is “disrespectful of governments and respectful of people’s movements of resistance.” This affinity with the underdog is combined with the emphasis on history as a struggle between haves and have-nots—a sentiment one might attribute to Karl Marx. Having written plays about Marx, Professor Zinn made no secret about where he stood.
The 2015 edition (five years after Zinn’s death) cites waves of local school sentiment demanding a more “patriotic” version of American history: a February 2015 case in Oklahoma, where all Advanced Placement (AP) U.S. History courses were banned due to a focus on “what is bad about America”. Zinn’s book is seen as a clear counterweight in an era of teachers seeking to “impose ‘patriotic’ views of history” on their students.
In the Blue Corner—Schweikart and Allen
Written first in 2004, with the most recent edition coming in 2019, A Patriot’s History of the United States makes less of a clear political stance in the authors’ opening pages. Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen do, however, make clear their views on the state of American historical writings in their original introduction:
We utterly reject “My country right or wrong”—what scholar wouldn’t? But in the last thirty years, academics have taken an equally destructive approach: “My country, always wrong!” We reject that too.
Further in the introduction, the authors do not relent in their attack on academia, accusing recent American historical writings as assuming “that ideas don’t matter and that there is no such thing as virtue.” The introduction cites four “Pillars of American Exceptionalism”:
- Bottom-up Protestant church governance (congregationalism)
- Bottom-up legal traditions (common law, originating with the Germanic Angles and Saxons who came to England in the 5th century)
- The right to private property
- Capitalism and free market economy
The introduction demands that virtue be wedded to skill to produce competent leaders, and laments the 20th century’s “subtle and, at times, obvious campaign to separate virtue from talent, to divide character from success.”
Force Them to Talk to Each Other
These two books have been co-opted by the opposing camps in the fight over America’s past. It seems reasonable that People would appeal to those on the political left, while Schweikart and Allen cite Patriot’s burgeoning popularity with homeschoolers—a group that, in aggregate, likely leans right—and Rush Limbaugh (who certainly did).
Even in terms of historiographical style, the authors differ. While both books frequently draw on primary source quotations, Patriot’s offers the end notes in the back, while People’s does not have any full citations—making it occasionally more difficult to identify relevant sources for an author’s claim. Further, Zinn structured his chapters around themes more than on chronology of events. Because of this, People’s will almost certainly place more emphasis on items or subjects that Zinn considered more important, possibly ignoring other topics altogether. By contrast, Patriot’s is structured with start/end years for each chapter.
That said, the books have something important in common—they both portray themselves as presenting a version of history counter to a consensus they reject. It’s unclear whether this indicates the shifting tides of public discourse given the differing publication dates, or simply the historian’s impulse to rail against some distant “them”.
Unfortunately, the respective authors were probably as unlikely to exchange views as their respective readers. This is what we’re going to address, by forcing these two books to “talk to each other”.
In this series, we’ll conduct a brief survey of American history, using content from these two books as our source. The goal will be to reconcile perspectives, get comfortable with challenging views, and seek some level of clarity. Our intent isn’t to ultimately justify or endorse one grand scheme over the other—rather, we will learn what we can—but we will expect the competing perspectives to be reasonable and internally consistent; any lack of consistency should only invite further questions. Without further ado: let’s challenge our assumptions about history.
