The Battleground of 1776

I’ve never reprinted a Perspectives column. And with only three issues remaining before my retirement, it is perhaps a foolish squandering of additional opportunities to offer my perspective on the wide array of historical issues that we engage at the AHA. Family, friends, and colleagues are likely to express surprise that I would forgo any occasion to articulate an opinion. There are, however, important reasons to set precedent aside and republish my March 2021 column on the Trump administration’s “1776 Report.” At the time, I warned that although President Biden withdrew the report and disbanded the commission that had created it, we were not yet finished with this misguided adventure into “history without historians.” The AHA, supported by 47 organizations, condemned the report for what it was: a document whose “authors call for a form of government indoctrination of American students, and in the process elevate ignorance about the past to a civic virtue.”

This was, according to a recent commentary in The Federalist, “the unkindest cut of all.” Calling for the report to be reissued, its defender blasted the report’s critics (“the usual suspects”) as subversive, unpatriotic, and uninformed. As is so often the case with criticism of the AHA’s work on social media and elsewhere, I not only stand by our words but am proud to be the target of whatever vitriol our carefully crafted and historically informed statements attract.

We must confront our past if we are to learn from it.

Moreover, because the 2024 Republican platform pledges to “reinstate the 1776 Commission” as we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, I don’t take lightly the pleas from The Federalist and others for a revival of that deeply flawed report. What I said four years ago remains the central issue for historians: “[Its authors] want neither to confront our past nor to learn from it.”

And that lies at the heart of the matter. I predicted correctly that the 1776 Report would insinuate its way into what was just beginning to emerge at the time as state legislative initiatives to limit teaching of “divisive concepts” such as critical race theory. The AHA has written to legislators across the country with the same message: We must confront our past if we are to learn from it.

A Paradox (March 2021)

I’m wrestling with a dilemma, a paradox. Media, social and otherwise, want to know why history has seemingly lost status in higher education. Majors are declining; enrollments have stabilized unevenly across institutions. Departments are being consolidated and losing positions as chairs are told to tighten their belts.

At the same time, history itself—along with history education and the public commemoration of historical events—pervades these same media, the focus of battles over the very essence and future of the United States. The already iconic photographs from the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol reek of history: medieval imagery, the 1775 Gadsden flag, abundant Confederate emblems. Reporters ask historians whether 1619 or 1776 holds the key to our national identity, or why state legislators have disparaged a particular set of curricula and introduced bills that list forbidden concepts, topics, and perspectives.

The controversy generating the most attention of late is the already infamous report from “The President’s Advisory 1776 Commission,” issued on the last full day of the Trump administration. After President Biden quickly withdrew the report and disbanded the commission, many journalists and historians breathed sighs of relief; surely this was the end of the matter. But the report lives on, not only in the National Archives as an official document but also on the Heritage Foundation website as part of an attack on academic historians and The New York Times and Pulitzer Center’s 1619 Project Curriculum. As one journalist told me, one commission member has made it clear that she “wants school boards and students to read the report,” and that “the deactivated commission still plans to meet and rework the report.”

The broader and more enduring goal is to perpetuate celebratory myths of a nation whose essence lies in extremely limited government and cultural homogeneity.

The 1776 Commission is not yet dead. I fear seeing the report put to use, zombielike, to delegitimate the work of professional historians, while activists and legislators work—as boosters or propagandists, not as historians—to influence local history education. This is already brewing in at least three state legislatures (Arkansas, Iowa, and Oklahoma), with bills in the hopper that aim to purge teaching materials of “divisive concepts.” Consider proposed legislation in Arkansas:

A public school shall not allow a course, class, event, or activity within its program of instruction that: Promotes the overthrow of the United States Government; Promotes division between, resentment of, or social justice for a: (A) Race; (B) Gender; (C) Political affiliation; (D) Social class; or (E) Particular class of people.

The AHA’s statement on the 1776 Commission report articulates what is at stake. Although the immediate target of the commission, the president who appointed it, and its allies in state legislatures is the 1619 Project, the broader and more enduring goal is to perpetuate celebratory myths of a nation whose essence lies in extremely limited government and cultural homogeneity. They want neither to confront our past nor to learn from it.

In the context of the current fixation on the 1619 Project, it is not merely the question of whether 1619 or 1776 represents the nation’s “founding.” It is a matter of whether one can understand documents written by slaveholders in the late 18th century without understanding their world—one in which humans had owned, bought, and sold other humans for nearly two centuries.

Historians know this, including those who have identified flaws in the 1619 Project. But the proponents of a history that marginalizes slavery and its aftermath while denying the deep and continuing impact of racism on nearly all aspects of American life would rather not have historians at the table. There were no professional historians of the United States on the 1776 Commission. Nor were any historians consulted by the San Francisco Board of Education in advance of its recent decision to rename 44 public schools. The chair of the school “renaming committee” believes historians themselves to be both troublesome (here’s that paradox again) and irrelevant. “What would be the point?” in consulting a historian, he asked. “History is written and documented pretty well across the board. And so, we don’t need to belabor history in that regard. . . . Based on our criteria, it’s a very straightforward conversation. And so, no need to bring historians forward to say—they either pontificate and list a bunch of reasons why, or [say] they had great qualities. Neither are necessary in this discussion.”

These controversies are by no means equivalent. What happened in San Francisco is unusual, an extreme case, in the battles over naming. But in its details can be found a call to action for historians, to be aware of what is happening not only in our state legislatures but in our communities and school boards—indeed all those civic associations that Alexis de Tocqueville so admired—and to show up, perhaps even to join the table without a special invitation. We cannot heal this nation without accurately understanding its pathologies, which are by their very nature historical.

To read the AHA Statement Condemning Report of the Advisory 1776 Commission, visit historians.org/1776-commission-report.