The truth and sanity of American history

I AM A HISTORY PROFESSOR AT ONE OF THE UNIVERSITIES under attack by the Trump Administration. I am also a flagwaving patriot with an abiding love of the U.S. Those two statements might seem surprising, or contradictory, if you do not know what has happened to the teaching and writing of American history in the past 50 years. Earlier this year, President Donald Trump issued an Executive Order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” It asserts that American historians have rewritten American history and replaced “objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”

- BY JAMES T. KLOPPENBERG

That’s not true. There has been a change, but it has been driven by facts rather than ideology. Why do historical interpretations change? We expect medicine to make progress thanks to new scientific research, but isn’t the past over?

No, it isn’t. In the middle of the 20th century, understandably proud of America’s indispensable role in defeating totalitarian autocracy, historians tended to emphasize our nation’s undeniable achievements. Especially since the 1960s, in part because of the Black freedom struggle, feminism, and other social movements that challenged prevailing distributions of power in the U.S., historians have been asking different questions and probing other dimensions of our past.

Combining old and new methods, including the discovery of previously unknown sources and the use of statistical analysis, historians digging in the archives have uncovered solid evidence concerning the expansion of freedom for many Americans and the denial of freedom for many others. The experiences of enslaved Africans, women, Indigenous people, ordinary soldiers, owners of small businesses, and countless other Americans have emerged from a generation’s painstaking research into a new light.

HISTORIANS HAVE DELIVERED these truths to the public with the understanding that our entire history should be known. Such knowledge, fully consistent with patriotism, provides an indispensable foundation for debates about contemporary issues. We should, of course, tell stories about the undeniable virtue and valor so many Americans have shown. But to see American history as simply a narrative of heroism would be a lie unbecoming a great nation.

What are historical facts?