The History Culture Wars in Academic Testing

Republican National Committee Condemns New AP History Framework from Education Week
"The Republican National Committee is calling for a fight against the College Board's new framework for Advanced Placement U.S. History, claiming that it  "deliberately distorts and/or edits out important historical events." The new framework "reflects a radically revisionist view of American history that emphasizes negative aspects of our nation's history while omitting or minimizing positive aspects,..."
Conservative-leaning president of the National Association of Scholars (NAS) has his lengthy critique of the new framework HERE.

I've actually been thinking about this quite a bit in the last several years.  There is ONE area where I share the NAS president's concern (even as I find the larger intellectual landscape he lives in to be absurdly reactive).  Some may find this to be odd, given my background as a social historian, but here it is: I now think social historians made a mistake back in the 1970s and later when they caste their claim to intellectual and pedagogical turf as one IN OPPOSITION TO traditional political, intellectual and military history and biography.  Without in any way negating the importance of social history (and the extraordinary historical worlds they have opened up and put into classrooms everywhere), I think social historians forgot the essential element "traditional" historical methods and topics had or could have in developing an informed foundation of what used to be called "civics" or "informed citizenship."

Based on my own experience as a student (lo those many years ago) and as a teacher, I have the fear that we (those of us who care about us having a historically informed population) have largely lost two generations of students who are astonishingly clueless on how our government has functioned, what are its guiding lights or principles, and what that government has done and not done in the last 230+ years.  I have seen it in both my contemporaries (non-historian types in our generation) and now my students at CMU and elsewhere.  Make no mistake, I think my students at CMU were GREAT students!  And that fact makes it doubly vexing.  I have been deeply disturbed by what fodder they (and their parents) have become for the sweeping, baseless assertions made by every right-wing windbag (Glenn Beck University!) and FOX News twisted "news brief".  Bill O'Reilly and legions of others make historical claims that are so wildly off-base -- and yet average people and now even **reporters** are so poorly grounded in "traditional history" that such claims go out largely unchallenged.

It is RARE that I meet anyone of our generation (born in the mid-1960s) or younger who has ANY grasp at all of US history (traditional or otherwise).  Ask any non-academic person of a certain age or younger to name ONE cause of World War One -- you will almost assuredly be greeted by silence.  As a committed social historian, I have reluctantly concluded that we need to put some version of political and military history BACK IN.  It would not be INSTEAD OF what social history has provided, but in addition to.  Moreover, we don't need the "great white man" version of the story or one where memorizing names, dates, and a set narrative are the focus -- but more on the constitution, the bill of rights, the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World War II, etc., etc. would be a good thing.  I also suspect there is a real LONGING out in the country for more focus on these issues. -- Nuggetsman