Pride, Agency, and Duty: Study America’s Past to Secure Her Future

Ignorance of America’s institutions, principles, and history weakens commitment to our nation and its future. It threatens the country as much as any foreign army. Without a knowledge of the country’s history, young people will struggle to realize how important, precious yet fragile, our constitutional order remains.

National Council on American History and Civics Education

As America celebrates the 250^th anniversary of our nation’s independence, citizens should advocate for reinvigorating the study of U.S. history because learning about our past is important to securing our future. Ignorance of history allows others to manipulate it, including hostile foreign powers and fellow Americans who promote division and self-loathing. Specious interpretations of the past undermine our common identity as Americans, sap our ability to work together, and erode our pride in who we are and the principles for which we stand. As the late philosopher Richard Rorty observed, “National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals, a necessary condition for self-improvement.” Pride in our nation’s history is important because it inspires young Americans to take responsibility for defending freedom and building a better future.

Pride should not derive from a contrived happy view of history, but rather from a recognition that our radical experiment in government of the people, by the people and for the people always was and remains a work in progress. Any student of U.S. history will recognize that we are still coping with the legacy of slavery. The emancipation of four million of our fellow Americans after the most destructive war in our history was only the beginning of a long journey for equal rights. Milestones along that journey included the failure of Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, and separate but equal. In the 1960s, the civil rights movement dismantled the legal basis for Jim Crow segregation, but cultural, economic, educational, and other forms of disenfranchisement continued.

But students should also know that it is an abuse of history to cast the American Revolution as an effort to preserve slavery rather than a righteous struggle to win independence and found our nation on principles that ultimately rendered that criminal institution unsustainable. The New York Times’ 1619 project was a politically motivated effort to reframe U.S. history and promote its conception of social justice. Similarly, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Southern Historical Society and United Daughters of the Confederacy promoted the Myth of the Lost Cause to portray slavery as benign instead of cruel and the Civil War as an effort to preserve states’ rights rather than slavery all in service of obstructing equal rights for black Americans. Studying our history should inspire Americans to celebrate the principles enshrined in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution while recognizing that work remains to realize them.

Pride in nation that derives from the study of history might impel students to challenge those who want to put the words systemic or institutional in front of every problem. Deconstructionist, postmodernist theories such as postcolonial theory and critical race theory, if accepted uncritically, as they are on many college campuses, rob young people of agency and leave them with a toxic combination of anger and resignation. The study of history can help students recognize that, like their forebears, they can shape the future. They can improve equality of opportunity and access to quality education so that the zip code into which one is born does not impede access to the great promise of America. They can find ways to protect our privacy from the avarice of social media companies and counter disinformation while preserving freedom of speech. They can advocate for voting rights while demanding improved security and transparency of elections. They can harness the potential of artificial intelligence without compromising our humanity. They can stand against racism, sexism and other forms of bigotry without succumbing to philosophies that valorize victimhood and teach children to judge one another by identity category rather than character.

The study of history can also inspire civic duty. Knowledge that the American Revolution and other wars entailed tremendous hardship and sacrifice by those who accepted their obligation to fight should inspire gratitude and help students understand that freedom is not freedom from obligation. The history of the United States’ first 250 years can inspire the next generations of Americans to take up the charge that President Abraham Lincoln issued to those gathered on 19 November, 1863 at Gettysburg in the midst of America’s most destructive war to fulfill “the great task remaining before us---that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion---that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain---that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom---and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”