“History is not an American pastime,” Kevin Honold emphasizes in the Hudson Review, in a sonorous tract of musings about the Ohio heartland, Jesuit missionaries and the Age of Explorers; childhood and the imagination; the strategic advantage of trees for empire; plumbers; and the fate of the American Indian warrior. In sympathetic step with generations of social studies educators, Honold thinks this is explained in part by how history is taught to American schoolchildren: “As a thing from which they are meant to draw ‘lessons,’ as though history were a series of unfortunate incidents involving hot skillets and monkey cages.” Textbook history—history presented as moralizing schoolmarm or anodyne roll call of names and dates—fuels why advocates today lament but excuse teenagers’ lack of cranial investment in historical literacy.
“Textbook history” certainly doesn’t seem like an American pastime. Not only do we have ample evidence year after year that Americans of all ages and backgrounds barely know the highlight reel of their nation’s past, but even history’s professional practitioners also struggle to formulate a rationale for their subject that resonates. Alan Mikhail of Yale University recently implied as much in comments to the American Historical Association, in light of the discovery that history has had the sharpest (and starkest) decline out of all majors at US colleges and universities. Nor have the expert historians seemed able to persuade school principals, much less the general public, away from materially acceding history class to Google’s infinite yield of search returns.
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