A WORTHY PREOCCUPATION

Lost in the Mists of Time: For students who don't even know when the Civil War was fought, help is on the way. (RICHARD BROOKHISER, June 13, 2003, Wall Street Journal)

Why did American educators abandon traditional history for social studies? In part, precisely because they were American. We have a tradition of believing that we are beyond tradition or history, before the Fall or outside time, as if the New World made us New Men. When our mood swings to bleakness, we take on the burden of our original national sins--from slavery to exploitation to the extermination of the passenger pigeon. That is equally unhistorical, a theology not of innocence but of damnation.

American present-mindedness and self-absorption finds an unlikely ally in determinist schools of historiography. If the world is moved by the slow grinding of tectonic plates, then the important events and great actors who once decorated history's pages must give way to the steady accretion of data. John Updike satirized this stance neatly in one of the minor characters in his novel "The Coup," a history professor who specialized in the continuity of postal service from the presidency of Millard Fillmore to that of Benjamin Harrison. As a result, he ignored the Civil War--much like the students Mrs. Bush mentioned.

Alternative models have always been available to teachers. The American character itself is mixed. When we have not ignored history, we have been obsessed with it. The founding generation was preoccupied with the example of the ancient world. After John Adams, the future second president, rode off to attend the Continental Congress, his wife, Abigail, wrote him that she asked their seven-year-old son, Johnny, the future sixth president, to read her a page or two of Roman history every day. John Adams approved: "The education of our children is never out of my mind. . . . Fix their attention upon great and solid objects, and their contempt upon little, frivolous and useless ones." Later leaders read about the founding fathers--young Lincoln read Parson Weems's biography of Washington. Theodore Roosevelt was himself a competent historian; Grant was a more than competent memoirist.

Help is available from the highest levels of the discipline. Mr. Updike's dull professor is in fact somewhat old-fashioned. Simon Schama's book on the French Revolution, "Citizens," was a sweeping narrative that dared to praise the revolutionaries who were well intentioned and condemn those who were murderous. Thanks to scholars like Bernard Bailyn, Edmund Morgan and Gordon Wood, the academic history of the American Revolution has been much more concerned with ideas and politics (what the revolutionaries themselves were concerned with) than with the postal service.

Not only was Teddy Roosevelt a fine historian, though a bad president, in a delightful irony he a wrote a biography of Gouverneur Morris , who is now the topic of Mr.
Brookhiser's latest book, Gentleman Revolutionary : Gouverneur Morris, the Rake Who Wrote the Constitution. If you've never read any of the series of bios of the Founders that Mr. Brookhiser has been writing the past few years, we highly recommend them, as well as the fine film he did for PBS, Rediscovering George Washington. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 13, 2003 10:49 PM